Be Dazzled: A Supernatural Twilight Crossover
by iSparkle616
Summary: It was supposed to be a normal hunt for the Winchesters. Too bad they ended up in Forks, Washington.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** This story was written for fun and no profit is being made from it. The Cullens and Bella Swan belong to Stephenie Meyer and she is welcome to them. The Winchester boys, the Impala, Bobby Singer, and Ellen Harvelle belong to the CW and Eric Kripke; we are only borrowing them and no harm is intended.

**Warnings:** Rated for language, violence and character death. Sam & Dean got roughed up a bit, but they'll recover. The same, however, cannot be said for the Cullens.

THIS STORY IS NOT TWILIGHT-FRIENDLY. If you can't deal, bail now. The 'back' button is your friend.

**Setting:** Spring of Season 1, Supernatural. Follows Supernatural canon through Episode 1.20, Dead Man's Blood, but then goes AU.

**A/N: **This story is complete; chapters will be posted periodically.

**Prologue**

There are a couple of strangers in Forks.

Charlie doesn't like strangers, because keeping an eye on them cuts into his fishing time. Isabella Swan is putting her spoon into her cereal bowl and scooping up milky blobs of Count Chocula and putting them into her mouth and chewing them and swallowing and scooping up another spoonful when Charlie tells her he's going in to work early to mobilize his deputies.

"Have to keep an eye on strangers," he explains as he puts his coffee mug in the fridge and the butter in the sink. "They might not know about things like proper turn signals and feeding the parking meters."

Bella nods because it's just easier if Charlie thinks she's listening to him and she eats her cereal and drinks her juice while she thinks about Edward's warm topaz eyes. She gets kind of lost in all the dreamy dripping amber thoughts and when she snaps out of her swoon, Charlie has gone and the rest of her cereal is soggy. She closes her mouth and wipes her chin and gets up to put her bowl in the sink and move the butter.

It's cloudy and looks like rain and Bella only poked herself in the eye with her spoon once. It's going to be a good day.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

"Is he still watching me?" Dean hisses, bending low over the coffee shop table.

"No," Sam says without lifting his gaze.

"I can feel his eyes burning holes in the back of my neck!"

"Dramatic-- but paranoid."

"It's not paranoia if they're actually staring at you!" Dean whispers, craning around the laptop screen Sam's steadfastly hiding behind. "Sam!"

His brother sighs. He looks up in time to catch the Forks police deputy whipping his head back around. The deputy's suddenly very interested in the menu board behind the counter. "Huh. Okay, he's not watching you _now_…"

"But he was."

"I guess so." Sam glances back at Dean. "You're leaning in your plate." Dean straightens up and rubs at the front of his shirt. Sam glances back at the cop, who jerks away again to stare up at the menu. "Huh."

"See? I told you they were following us all morning."

"It's a small town."

"And the last time the local law followed me around a small town I ended up tied to a tree as a sacrifice to a god!"

"You're in your plate again."

Dean sits up and throws money on the table. He shoves his chair back. "C'mon. Let's go."

"Where?"

"Police station. Have it out with these yahoos."

* * *

Bella sways back and forth in the kitchen, hugging herself and pretending it's Edward's smooth, cold, marble arms encircling her. The chicken is sizzling and popping on the stove in front of her and Charlie is nattering away behind her and Bella imagines Edward swooping her away from such mundane annoyances as food and fathers.

Charlie is tired from his long day shadowing the strangers, but it turns out they aren't nearly as sinister as he'd feared. Bella stopped listening back around the time she dropped the wet chicken thighs into the pan of smoking hot oil and Charlie clapped the lid over the resulting flare-up, but before he'd saved her eyebrows he'd babbled something about officers from the Wildlife Service.

"They're looking into animal deaths in the area," Charlie says. "They had charts and maps showing some real unusual patterns of dead wolves and mountain lions and bears in this county."

"That's nice, Charlie."

"Well, no, Bells, it's not exactly _nice_. These are protected species we're talking about."

"Wolves and mountain lions are dangerous and mean," Bella says. "Who cares if another vicious animal killed them?"

"An animal wouldn't leave the carcasses virtually untouched. Officer Antilles and his partner Janson think it's some kind of thrill-killer. Someone who gets a sick rush from slaughtering challenging prey."

In her daydream, Edward has wrapped Bella in the cool marble cocoon of his embrace and is waltzing her around their sun-filled meadow, glittering like her own personal disco ball. Something about Charlie's words send a little niggle of concern through Bella's mind, but she pushes it away in favor of the image of Edward's breathtakingly dazzling face filling her mind's eye.

* * *

Early Saturday morning Bella is awakened by fingers of the coolest, smoothest, hardest marble caressing her face. Edward's liquid topaz eyes hover above hers, awash with anguish and regret.

"Bella, my precious, you must be strong," he murmurs.

She sits up so fast only Edward's superhuman speed keeps their foreheads from bashing together. "What is it?"

"It will be difficult, my darling, but we can get through this."

"Edward, I'm frightened!" Bella cries, her heart fluttering like a bird trying to escape a cage. Which would be fatal if successful, but maybe then Edward would bite her, so her heart flying from her chest might actually be a good thing.

Edward stands, slipping his hands of chill marble grace from hers, and strides to the window he'd sneaked through moments earlier. "Don't despair, Bella dearest!" he murmurs, and flings open the curtain with a great sweep of his arm.

Sunlight floods the room, setting Edward's sculpted brow ablaze with the light of a thousand glittering crystals. Bella, not for the first time, is struck speechless.

"Sun's out," Edward says, raising his chin and turning slightly so the cold column of his throat shimmers like a sequined prom dress in candlelight. "I have to stay inside today."

* * *

All her plans for the day lie in ruins about her feet, crushed into dust. Bella sobs piteously after Edward slips away to sequester himself in the house with his family. "It's not fair!" she weeps into her pillow. A wave of rage crashes over her, and she gnashes her teeth. "How can it be sunny, today of all days? Edward was going to take me _out_!"

Finally her pillow is too wet to be comfortable anymore, so Bella drags herself out of bed. Charlie is whistling happily as he knocks about the kitchen and his good mood turns Bella's stomach. She grabs her purse and flees.

"I'm going downtown," she calls over her shoulder.

"Good, take advantage of the beautiful day!" Charlie yells after her.

* * *

There's not much to do in Forks besides wander aimlessly from shop to shop, so that's what Bella does. She's in the drugstore, flipping through the romance novels and determining that not one of them compares to the epic grandeur of her and Edward's towering love, when the clerk leans around the display stands cluttering the counter to peer out the window.

"Look at those two, walking down the street like they belong. I tell you, Miss Swan, I feel better knowing your Daddy checked out those strangers."

That little ghost of a worry teases at the back of Bella's mind-- something Charlie was saying, something about dead animals…?-- but then is brushed aside by her desire to get a glimpse of these strangers causing all the small-town ruckus. She jams the paperback she's holding back into the rack and hurries to the door.

She can see them through the glass, two guys older than her, one really tall and cute except he needs a haircut and one really hot, okay he totally _is_, except not as hot as Edward of course, plus he doesn't _sparkle_ and…

And Bella is brought up short by a hard yank on her shoulder.

Oh. Her purse has gotten caught in the drugstore door.

She turns to free it and the strap wraps around her arms and pins them to her sides. "Wait, wait, Miss Swan!" the clerk is yelling, but Bella can handle this on her own and she leans on the door and pushes.

The door pops open and Bella wrenches free. The momentum sends her hurtling across the sidewalk. Her right foot catches on the curb, and, because her arms are still pinned by her purse strap, she falls face-first onto the rough pavement of Main Street.

It's like running into Edward's solid marble chest, except grittier and without the padding of Edward's 800-count Egyptian cotton shirt. Everything is spinning around her and her nose hurts and there's gravel in her mouth and her stomach aches from having the wind knocked out of her.

"Whoa!" someone says above Bella, and, "Well, don't just stand there, help her up!" says someone else. Hands grab her upper arms and hoist her upright.

Bella sways while her eyes cross and uncross. She manages to catch her breath and when her eyes focus, it's those two guys who've helped her up, the Wildlife Service officers. The tall one is unwinding the strap from around her upper body.

"Wow, I've never seen anyone attacked by their own purse before," he says.

The other one, the hot one-- though naturally his hotness doesn't come close to Edward's glowing, golden-eyed beauty-- is supporting Bella, though he's kind of keeping her at arm's length and watching her warily. If Edward were here he wouldn't be keeping her at arm's length and watching her warily. Edward would be folding her into the cool glistening comfort of his embrace and murmuring soothing things into her hair and probably stroking her forehead very gently.

So Bella bursts into tears and makes a sudden lunge forward.

"Aww, hell!" the hot one says. He tries to pry her off, but Bella's good at clinging. "Sammy, little help here?"

"You look like you're doing fine on your own," his partner says.

"She's getting snot and blood all over my leather jacket!" he hisses, and it's _totally not fair_, he's supposed to feel _sorry_ for her. Bella wails and wraps herself around him like a vine.

The tall one laughs and a car door creaks nearby and then he's pressing a big folded square of soft cotton under her face. "Here you go," he says. "Are you okay?" and it _is_ okay, because he looks really, really _concerned_. Bella sniffles into the cloth and nods and tries to smile up at him because _clearly_ this one knows how to take pity on poor accident-prone girls who've just face-planted in the street. She pulls away irritably from the hot one-- who is still muttering about his stupid _coat_ and even if he were sparkly he wouldn't be anywhere _near_ Edward-level gorgeousness-- and she turns eagerly to the tall cute one. He takes a step back and the _concern_ changes to alarm.

"Um, you better go back in the drugstore and sit down and see if they have a coldpack," he says. He stretches over and spins Bella by her shoulders so she's pointed toward the door.

And instead of helping her inside and hovering over her and cooing with concern, he backs away. Kind of fast, too.

Bella bursts into tears again. The hot one jumps away from the resulting spray of blood with a _really bad word_ and brushes hard at his stupid coat.

"Coldpack," the tall one says. "Get them to give you a coldpack. Take care now."

And Bella is left to see to her own first aid all by herself. She stares forlornly after the two Wildlife Service officers as they hustle away to a junky old black car parked a few spaces down the street. She's kind of stunned they didn't fall over themselves to rescue her. They definitely don't belong in Forks.

"That was _my_ t-shirt, you jerk," the hot one says just before they slam the car doors and roar off.

* * *

Sam won't stop laughing.

He's gonna wake up to his shorts in the ice machine if he doesn't knock it the hell off. Dean's already cranked the music to drown him out, but he can still see him from the corner of his eye, slouched in the passenger seat and having shaking fits every few minutes.

"Come on, it wasn't that funny."

"Oh, it was! You should've seen your face…"

"It was _unsanitary_ is what it was."

Sam just leans on the door and giggles. Dean glares out the side window so he doesn't have to look at him anymore and something flashes past the driver's side, insanely fast.

"What the hell was that?"

"What was what?"

"Shut up, I saw something weird." Dean kills the engine and gets out.

The road behind them is empty. Trees and thick ferns grow right up to the shoulders, and except for leaves rustling lightly in the breeze, nothing moves. Dean steps out to the center line and stares back toward town.

"What did it look like?" Sam's out of the Impala, leaning his elbows on the roof.

"Like a really fast… thing."

"I think they get moose up here."

"It was not a _moose_." Dean turns slowly in a circle, but there's nothing to see except dense greenery and a strip of blue sky above the road. "Get in. Let's go take a look."

He pulls a tight U-turn and heads slowly back toward Forks, twisting and ducking to peer out the windows as he drives. There's no sign of tracks on the soft shoulders or of torn branches or leaves along the treeline.

They've gone no more than a half-mile when a narrow line of trees ahead and to the right suddenly sways as if under the force of intense wind. Dean brakes just as something darts out of the forest. At first glance it doesn't look any more unearthly than a tall, pale boy. He-- or it-- catches sight of the car and sends an intensely smoldering glare through the windshield. Its nostrils twitch and it slinks onto the roadway, lips peeling back in a snarl.

Sam leans forward, squinting. "Are those _fangs_?"

Dean's already reaching for the gun in his waistband. "Damn, I hope not."

Nose still twitching, the thing is looping around toward the driver's side, its sallow eyes focused on Dean. It spots the gun and tenses. One hand rises, fingers hooked into claws; it takes another step forward and as it does, it crosses into a patch of sunshine.

"Holy shit, it's _sparkly!_" Sam yelps.

Its exposed skin gives off a harsh glitter, and a sibilant hissing leaks from between its bared teeth.

"Shoot it!"

Dean leans out the window and empties an entire clip into the creature while Sam's still frantically flailing over the back of the seat. He can see the bullets hit-- all that brilliant shine makes an awesome target-- but they don't faze the glittering thing one bit.

"Why do you smell like my Bella?" it growls, sashaying closer like a model on a runway.

"Oh, shit." Dean digs in his pocket for a fresh clip. "Shoot it, Sam! Shoot it, shoot it, shoot…"

Sam's finally untangled a salt-loaded shotgun out of a canvas bag and he hangs out his window and fires. Whatever-the-hell-it-is might not mind bullets, but it doesn't much like its eyes blasted full of rock salt.

Dean throws the Impala into reverse and guns it. Sam yelps. "Lemme get in first!"

"Shut up and let me drive!"

The thing is stomping in a circle, pawing at its eyes and keening shrilly. Sam frantically cranks the window closed as they roar backwards down the road.

"What the hell was that?"

"Vampire!"

"But it's _sparkly_!"

"You saw its teeth-- and they were practically in my face!" The shoulder widens and Dean slews into it, yanks the wheel around, and pulls out frontward. When Sam stops bouncing off the door and dashboard, he fumbles out his cell phone.

"What are you doing?"

"Calling Dad! He told us about vampires, he'll know…"

Dean's eyes bulge and he snatches the phone. "No!"

"Dean, that thing was _sparkling_!"

"Which is why we're not calling _Dad_." He glances away from the road just long enough to scroll down the list of numbers. "I'll call Bobby."


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

"I'm telling you, man, it's a vampire that _sparkles_ in the _sun_," Dean says for the third time.

"Dean, you idjit, what've you been drinkin'?" Bobby hollers. "Put your brother on the damn phone!"

Sam's trying to type furiously with the laptop balanced on his knees. He sets it carefully on the seat, takes the phone Dean's shoving at him, and braces his other hand on the dashboard while the Impala careens around a curve on two wheels. "Bobby. It's a vampire. It sparkles."

There's a long silence. "Go back to your motel and lock yourselves in," Bobby barks. "Lemme make some calls."

He disconnects. Sam closes the cell phone. "I don't think he believes us."

Dean snorts and presses harder on the accelerator.

* * *

"Ellen? Bobby Singer."

"Bobby! What can I do for you?"

"Those fool Winchester boys've got themselves mixed up in somethin' _weird_. Got any idea what would make 'em hallucinate sparkly vampires?"

"…Nothing _I've_ ever heard of, outside a three-day tequila bender. You did say…?"

"Yeah, vampires that goddamn sparkle. In the sun, apparently. Both of 'em are sayin' it, an' Dean mighta thrown in a 'glittery' and a 'twinklin' for good measure. Downright unsettlin'."

"They aren't in upstate New York, are they? I heard there's some kind of fae infestation at a petting zoo up there."

"Nah, they were lookin' into suspicious wild animal deaths in Washington State. Bodies by the dozen, all in the same area, all of 'em drained of blood."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. Wild animals? Big ones?"

"Yeah, whole packs of wolves, mountain lions, bears… You got somethin'?"

"Maybe. Bill and I crossed paths with a guy once, dealt with some strange polar bear deaths up in the Yukon. When he tracked down the killer, he swore he-- or it-- glittered in the sunlight. Let me see if I still have his info around."

* * *

"You might not be hallucinatin' after all," Bobby says when Dean answers his phone.

"Never thought we were."

"Got in touch with a guy who ran across somethin' like what you're seein', few years back. Ex-Royal Canadian Mounted Police, up in the Yukon. Didn't take kindly to polar bears turnin' up dead and bled dry all over his territory."

"Like the animals around here."

"Yup. So he went after this thing, cornered it on a cliff ledge. Said it looked human, but anything that could kill an angry momma polar bear bare-handed probably wasn't. Then it stepped outta the cliff shadow and the Mountie said it lit up like the Northern Lights."

"Told you. Sparkly. Ass. Vampire."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Any case, Mountie has some theory about secretions leakin' out the skin an' crystallizin'. Somethin' about lickin' slugs when he was a boy-- don't ask."

"But he was able to kill it."

"Finally. Said his partner pumped the thing full of bullets, slowed it down enough that he hacked its head off."

"The usual with vampires then, even though they sparkle."

"Not quite-- Mountie did say the parts wouldn't stop twitchin', an' I never heard of a vampire behavin' like that. This is some weird-ass mutant bloodsucker you stumbled on."

"Great. So how do we finish it off?"

"Mountie said he chopped it up and burned the pieces, burned 'em down to ash."

* * *

"Okay, so here's a list of funeral homes in the area," Sam says, tearing off a sheet of motel paper and holding it up. Dean's too busy peeking out a crack in the curtains to notice, so he flaps the paper noisily until his brother leaves his post and circles around to take it. "And the morgue is at the local hospital, so we can try there next if we have to."

"Yeah, okay. After dark tonight." Dean goes back to the window and presses his head flat against the wall, squinting out the narrow gap behind the drapes.

"Y'know, if this thing is as tough as Bobby says, regular bolts might not be enough." Sam watches Dean cross to the other side of the window and peer out at the parking lot.

"I saw a sporting goods store just outside of town. Maybe we can pick up heavy-duty bolts for the crossbow."

"Might be a little specialized for Forks, Washington, but we can check."

Dean goes into the bathroom and Sam can hear him fooling with the tiny window on the back wall, opening and closing its frosted-glass louvres. He comes back in the main room and paces back and forth between the beds.

"Why are you so twitchy?"

"That thing's got my scent. And I didn't like the way it looked at me."

"Oh, this isn't gonna be like that time in New York, is it?"

Dean sits on his bed and folds his arms. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you do. That guy with the curly hair, looked like he stepped out of GQ? You said he was trailing you around all the bars."

"He kept whispering shit about a 'traveling orgy'!"

"Right, right. And when his boyfriend finally got fed up and dragged him away, what was it he had again? Feathers?"

"Wings. Swear to god he had wings. And you didn't need to cut off all the booze for the week."

"Just looking out for my big brother. Hey, I think we should hit Stiva's Funeral Parlor first-- their website says they've got a viewing on Monday."

* * *

"Doh, Edwud," Bella moans. "I don' doh how I manid widdoud you."

Edward pets her forehead, his cold fingers more efficient than an icepack. "You _don't_ manage, you silly darling, that's the problem. Whyever did you leave the house on your own?"

Bella scrunches her face and thinks hard. The day is a featureless blur of sad-empty-empty-pavement-ow!-hot guy!-cute guy!-sad-EDWARD. "I… I don' rebember." She burrows into the marble god reclining in her bed, being careful not to dislodge the cylinders of gauze protruding from each of her nostrils.

"Next time you want to do something as foolhardy as window-shopping, let me know first. I nearly popped my fangs when Alice got the vision of you falling. I had to risk the sunlight to come to you." He settles against the headboard with a tender yet stone-hard and ice-cold arm around her shoulders.

"Yes, Edwud." Bella sighs and nuzzles closer. Edward's staring into the distance, a slight frown marring the pallid perfection of his brow. She rests against him as he lies still as a corpse, her chin slowly going numb on the slab of his chest.

Finally Bella can stand the brooding silence no longer. "Edwud? Are you bad ad be?" she asks in a tiny, pitiful voice.

"I could never be angry with you, precious." Edward turns to her and she gasps. His eyes, his ardent amber orbs, have darkened to an ominous ocher! "But as you can see, both my ire and my hunger have been awakened."

"Bud I _told_ you how by blood god on thad hod guy's jagged!" Bella whines.

Edward's eyes narrow to gleaming slits of smoked glass. "Bella, my dear one, why do you keep referring to him as 'hot'?"

"Because he was!" Bella exclaims. "Though nod as hod as _you_, ob course," she adds hastily.

"Of course." Edward scowls broodily some more. "I must go hunting," he announces, and Bella gasps and whimpers at the very thought of another day without the glittering sun of her universe. He clasps her hand to his chest, over the dead spot where his heartbeat would be. "It is for your own safety-- remember, I find the scent of your blood intoxicating. But if you promise you won't leave Alice's side until I return, I'll take you on a picnic tomorrow afternoon."

Bella bounces up and down on the bed, clapping her hands in delight. Picnics are so romantic! Her enthusiastic jouncing shakes loose one of the gauze plugs in her nose; a trickle of blood follows. Edward's eyes darken further and he draws back with a hiss.

Bella merely beams radiantly at him. "I trud you, by lub."

But he springs up and across the room in a single fluid bound. "I must go. Be strong and behave, my little freesia sprig."

* * *

Picnics _are_ romantic, Bella thinks, even picnics where one half of the couple doesn't eat food and the other half has a puffy nose and two black eyes, even picnics where the ground is soggy and the sky is overcast and the breeze is cold. Still, she intends this to be the utmost _perfect_ and _romantic_ picnic _ever_.

Alice arrives just as Charlie is heading out the door for another day of fishing-- he thinks the picnic is a girls-only outing, and Bella sees no reason to actually tell her father the truth-- and she is loaded down with grocery bags.

"How did you find a store open before nine on a Sunday morning?" Bella asks.

"I had a vision of your picnic, so I drove out to that 24-hour megamart last night," Alice trills in her music-box-ballerina voice. She pirouettes across the kitchen like a ballerina, too, and begins laying out her purchases on the counter.

Alice directs Bella in constructing the daintiest tea sandwiches Bella's ever seen, while she forms tiny flowers out of melon slices, melts white chocolate for dipping strawberries, and folds napkins into swans. Everything is going well-- Bella is actually having fun without Edward plastered to her side-- until it comes time to pack up the food.

"You don't have a picnic basket?" Alice asks, voice ringing with tragic disbelief.

"No, but Charlie has a whole collection of coolers!" Bella skips to the back porch.

Charlie does have a whole collection of coolers-- one even has yellow and pink Hawaiian flowers on it, which Bella finds quite festive-- and every one of them reeks of old bait.

"Hasn't your father ever heard of bleach?" Alice asks when she has finished retching like a bulimic music-box ballerina.

"Probably not." Bella feels her lower lip begin to tremble. Nothing to carry the food in-- the picnic is _ruined_, before it even began! How can this happen to her? She and Edward have more obstacles thrown in their path than Romeo and Juliet! Tears well in her eyes at the injustice of it all.

Alice leaps to the rescue. "Cover everything in plastic wrap and tuck it in the icebox. We'll go to Newton's Outfitters and buy picnic gear!" she cries in rallying tones.

By the time they reach Newton's, Alice has another list-- not just a picnic kit is needed, but a waterproof groundcloth, pillows to lounge on, an umbrella, a firepit to keep Bella warm. Not to mention a wheeled tote to transport it all. She's debating the romantic possibilities of purchased marshmallow toasting forks versus traditional sticks, and Bella is trying to explain that Charlie forbade her from toasting _anything_ over an open flame after that one summer when, well… and then they pull in to the parking lot.

The early-morning fishing and boating customers have already been and gone, and there's only one other car in the lot, a big black one Bella thinks vaguely she might recognize from somewhere. Alice frowns.

"Edward gave strict orders for me to protect you. Wait here until I make sure everything's safe inside."

"What could possibly be dangerous about Newton's?" Bella asks, mystified.

"I don't know, but Edward has a way of going on and on and on if I don't follow his orders, so let me check, please?"

Bella sighs and nods and leans back into the buttery softness of the expensive car's seat and then she reaches up and twists the rear-view mirror so she can see the Outfitter's door and Alice dancing lightly across the puddled lot toward it.

Several minutes later Alice waves to Bella, so she gets out and goes to join her.

The parking lot is heavily potholed, and one day of sunshine wasn't enough to dry up the deep puddles. Bella picks her way nervously between the pools of water, trying not to lose her balance and tumble in.

Just before she reaches the entrance, she hears a placid quacking, and a mother duck marches out of the shrubbery with a parade of tiny ducklings trailing behind.

"Oh! How cute!" Bella cannot restrain herself. She rushes forward, intent on picking up and cuddling the yellowest, fluffiest one. But as she swoops down on the adorable creature, she accidentally kicks aside one of its siblings.

* * *

Alice flits through Newton's. There are no gas leaks, no open flames. As long as she keeps Bella away from the knife case, there are no sharp edges. The ladies' room floor is not wet and the only two customers are talking quietly in the bowhunting aisle. Alice goes back to signal Bella, taking note of where the propane camp stoves are so she can guide the dear child away from them.

Bella exits the car without mishap, so Alice wanders into the barbeque and picnic supplies. Oh, look! One basket has a ruffled liner printed with smiling fruit! But the other one comes with a matching tablecloth in old-fashioned red-and-white checks! Alice can't decide which is more romantic and she looks around impatiently for Bella.

Outside, a cacophony of enraged quacking erupts. Alice jumps. From a few aisles over she hears "The hell is that?" She follows the sound of hurried footsteps to the front.

The two customers are looking out the glass door, blocking her view. Bella doesn't appear to be in the store, and alarm fills Alice. There's an awful lot of flapping out there.

"Oh, crap!" the shorter guy says. "It's that girl again!" He backs up, bumping Alice. "Sorry," he says, still backing away.

The taller one can't retreat without stepping on Alice. He gives the other one a death glare and says, "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes. I dealt with her last time."

Alice can see past the tall guy now, and there's a whole flock of ducks flapping and squawking and diving around the head of…

"_Bella!_" Alice wails.

The tall guy shoots another, deadlier glare at his friend. He takes a deep breath, gets a good grip on the doorframe, and flings open the door.

The ducks are deafening. Over the din, a plaintive cry can barely be heard. "Alice! Help me, Alice!"

He leans way out the door, seizes Bella's arm, and hauls her inside.

"Bella!" Alice reaches for Edward's beloved. She's a bit mud-splattered, but at least there's no blood. She looks dazed, though, and keeps shaking her head as if her brain has rattled loose.

Before Alice can comfort her, Bella gazes up at her rescuer. She blinks and takes a breath. Slowly, she begins to tip toward him.

"Um," he says, and his eyes get big and then he does some kind of quick stiff-arm spin thing with Bella so she ends up pressed against Alice. "Here's-your-friend-take-care-goodbye." He squeezes past them so fast there's a breeze.

"There, there." Alice pats Bella's back. "There, there. I'm going to think happy thoughts so Edward doesn't come roaring back here." She looks at the nearest display and thinks fiercely about mosquito repellant so Bella doesn't get sucked dry before Edward has the chance to turn her.

* * *

"You should've seen your face!"

"Shut up."

"In fact, you should see your face right now!"

"Just… Dean, just go buy the stupid bolts so we can get out of here, okay?"

Sam keeps checking behind him, but that girl and her friend are off squealing about happy fruit or something. Dean's considering the merits of crossbow accessories-- the extra-heavy bolts, or the ones with the razor-sharp tips? and what kind of predator problem does Forks have anyway, that the sporting goods store offers a choice?-- and Sam gets fed up.

"Just get them all!" He snatches both packages out of Dean's hands, snags the ones hanging from the pegs, and bundles the lot of them into his arms.

Dean raises his eyebrows. "All of 'em? They're pricey."

"Why not? You're the one always saying 'It's not our money'. Hurry up."

"Now who's twitchy?" But he follows Sam to the register.

The elegant woman at the check-out takes her damn sweet time, beaming and commenting they must be new in town and asking if they're staying for the fishing tournament, and Dean's playing along just to be a pain in the ass. Sam stifles the urge to tell her the tournament's why they're buying crossbow equipment, and instead glances casually around the store.

The two girls are by the camping equipment now. The clumsy one's holding onto a basket with both hands and the tiny one has a groundcloth rolled beneath one arm. Sam can't tell what they're looking at, but there's still a clear path to the door so it's okay. He nudges Dean. "Hurry up! They're on the move!"

"He's like a two-year-old," Dean says to the woman and smiles at her as he props one elbow on the counter. That's all the prompting she needs-- she pauses in the middle of running the credit card and starts gushing about cherry blossoms or some damn thing. Dean's refusing to make eye contact with him, so Sam sneaks another peek at the girls.

Shit. The little one's studying portable grills-- she's going to light a fire near that walking menace?-- and there's no sign of her friend. Sam strolls across the store, but he can't see her anywhere. He checks behind him, and in the few seconds he's making sure she isn't sneaking up on him, something rumbles.

There's a hollow 'boom', and the floor shakes. "_Owwwch!_" a girl shrieks.

"_Bella!_"

"Sam!"

"Your turn!" he yells back.

The epicenter seems to be on the far side of the register. Sam waits until Dean's cursing fades out a little before he dares to follow.

Bella's sprawled on the floor next to a tall metal display rack, a halo of soft brown feathers wafting gently around her head. A two-person canoe is lying bottom-up nearby, its pretty blue side dented.

"Bella, Bella, oh Bell-lla!"

Alice comes streaking down the aisle. Sam presses back against the endcap display to let her pass, and two things leap out at him. The first is that she's got the same freaky dun-colored eyes as Spangle Boy out there on the roadway-- at the moment, they're bugged out with worry, so it's not hard to notice.

And the second is apparent as Alice flits around the end of the aisle, past Sam and the display of lamps at his back. There are a couple of different desk lamps, a table lamp in the shape of a leaping salmon with its big fishy mouth gaping open, and some work lights with handles for hanging over work spaces. Some of them are plugged in, and all of them have the new lightbulbs advertised on the sign taped to the top shelf.

Lightbulbs that mimic natural sunlight.

The sign jabbing the back of Sam's shoulders lists a lot of health and practical benefits of lightbulbs that reproduce sunlight in your home, but it doesn't include the most important one as far as he's concerned-- that they make weird-ass mutant vampires sparkle just as if they were outside on a sunny day.

Alice flies past and the side of her face blinks on with a crystalline shimmer and then off again. She's rushing at Bella, and at the moment Bella's got her arms locked tight around Dean's neck and is trying to drag him down to the floor with her.

He's a little too preoccupied to notice what's bearing down on him. Sam grabs a hockey stick out of a big wooden bin. "Dean! Get away from her!"

"Trying!"

The woman from the register is crouched by the canoe, frowning and saying, "Oh, Bella, dear, are you all right?" very absently. Bella's chin is quivering and her eyes are brimming with tears and she's whimpering weakly, but she's still got an iron grip around Dean's neck and he's going under fast.

Sam steps up, reluctant to get in range of Bella and trying to keep an eye on Alice, when she darts in, slides her stark white hand beneath Bella's, and twists. Bella's grip pops loose and Alice shoves Dean aside, hard.

"Let go of dear Bella!" she hisses. She gathers the other girl into her arms and pats her back. "There, there. You poor thing."

Sam grabs a fistful of Dean's jacket and hauls him backward, keeping the hockey stick leveled on the seated girls. Dean scrambles up, rubbing his throat, and he sees what Sam's holding.

"Poke her!" he wheezes.

Sam shakes his head, pointing the stick at Alice. "Not the klutz, _her_! Dean, she _sparkles_!"

Alice whips her head up and her beautiful face twists with an ugly snarl. Sharp teeth glisten. "You tried to hurt Edward's beloved."

"You've got that backwards, sweetheart. _She _tried to strangle _me_." Dean slaps Sam's arm. "What do you think that hockey stick's gonna do, shoot blue sparks? Back up toward the door. Hey, lady!" He directs his voice toward the woman, who's still inspecting the dented canoe. "Think I can take my gear and go?"

She waves one hand. "Your card's probably gone through. I think Mike can hammer out the dents," she muses.

Alice is still cuddling Bella, but her gaze stays fixed on Dean the entire time he scoops up the bolts and hurries from the store. A low growl, almost inaudible over Bella's choked sobs, vibrates her throat.

Sam's just outside, shotgun in hand. "I _told _you to hurry up! But no, you had to be chatty!"

"Yeah, well, now we know we're dealing with a whole nest, don't we? And because I was chatting? I know who they are and where they live."

* * *

_With apologies to: Paul Gross, Rob Thurman, Jim Butcher._


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"I think we should call Dad."

"We're not calling Dad for something that sparkles."

Sam's got a soda bottle full of blood from the funeral home and the new crossbow bolts all lined up neatly on the dinette table, and he's dipping the points one by one in the dead man's blood. "Dean, did you see that other report I pulled up, the one about the grizzly bear? It probably weighed half a ton and something ripped it apart. The real Wildlife Service found pieces spread over nearly a square mile. These things aren't just killing to feed."

"So we don't let 'em get close enough to play with us. We can handle a few vampires."

"How do you know there's only a few?"

"Reconnaissance. We'll check out their nest and do a head count."

"Yeah, well, that's another thing. Have you noticed that daylight doesn't seem to bother them? When do they sleep?"

"Maybe they don't." Dean lets the curtain drop and joins Sam at the table. "That Newton's lady said 'the Cullen kids' all go to the local high school with her son. They're trying to pass as human, so they adapted."

"She say how many 'Cullen kids' there are?"

"I was about to ask, but a canoe fell off the wall. There's at least one posing as a parent, though."

Sam dips the last bolt and lays it carefully on the table to dry. "Give me your knife."

"Which one?"

"All of them? We don't even know if this works on them. I'll dose everything just in case."

"Yeah, okay." Dean starts ransacking duffle bags. "You know how normal vampires are compelled to pair up? If these work the same way, the parent's probably got a mate and so does that Alice. There'll be at least four."

Sam tilts the bottle and drizzles blood down the blade he's working on. "Five. I think the one we ran across on the road has its eye on turning Bella."

"He did call her 'my Bella'." Dean rolls his eyes. "Girl's dumb as a box of rocks, can't even tell her boyfriend is seriously off."

"Dean, we have to save her. She can't possibly understand what he's trying to turn her into." Sam sets down the knife and gazes earnestly at his brother.

"Oh, here come the puppy eyes. Knock it off, Sam. We kill the bloodsuckers, we save the ditz by default. Speaking of which, let's go scout their nest."

"Uh-uh." Sam sets another sticky blade in the row. "You ticked off the little one, groping her friend like that. We better wait 'til they settle down."

Dean shudders. "You've got a strange definition of groping. And even Dad couldn't have broken her chokehold."

"You still ticked off Alice."

"I know that! Jeez-- two of them sniffing after me now." He slides the laptop over. "Tell you what-- I'll Mapquest their nest so you can piss off the next vampire, okay?"

* * *

"What did the guidance counselor want?" Edward asks when Bella finally trudges out to the parking lot Monday afternoon.

"He thought someone's been beating me, can you believe it?" Bella heaves a huge, put-upon sigh and dumps her books on her truck's seat. She lifts her bruised, puffy, lumpy, scraped face to Edward's divine countenance. "I don't know why he would say such horrible things!"

"He doesn't understand what a delicate flower you are," Edward murmurs, folding her into his arms like an origami petal. "Come, let me sniff you." He sticks his cold marble nose in her neck. "Mmm, lilacs!"

"Edward, that tickles!" Bella giggles, but she doesn't pull away because he's so beautiful and he's chosen _her_ to tickle and sniff. She worms deeper into his chill embrace while his cold hard lips thud along her flesh. It's drizzling, so his mouth hardly even abrades her damp skin.

Bella and Edward nuzzle in the school parking lot while the last of their classmates trickle past on their way to their own cars. Edward is intent on sniffing himself silly on Bella's dizzying floral fragrance, so he is mostly able to ignore the students' thoughts; a few silent 'Get a rooms' do filter into his mind from particularly repulsed classmates. He smirks at their obvious envy.

Suddenly he becomes aware of Alice's thoughts clamoring for his attention. She's had a vision of… Edward drags his face out of Bella's wet, stringy hair and squints across the parking lot where she waits by his car. Jasper is skulking behind her, and Emmett looms from the far side of the Volvo. Only Rosalie is not agitated; she poses, expressionless, by her own convertible.

Alice's thoughts are tripping all over each other like she's talking too fast. Something about seeing two guys show up at home, the same ones from Newton's where Bella had her little incident-- a really good-looking one getting his neck squeezed and a really tall one in a cyclone of feathers. Alice thinks they're trouble, but she can't quite see why…

"Bella, go home," Edward orders abruptly, and she staggers back against her truck, blinking rapidly.

"Why, oh why, Edward? Are you mad at me? Did I do something to upset you? Oh!" Her face goes completely white and she sways in preparation for fainting. "_Are you breaking up with m_e_?_"

"No, I'm not breaking up with you!" Edward reminds himself that Bella smells too delectable to become impatient with her, and he only catches her elbows to keep her from falling, not to shake her. "Did you run into those two men from the drugstore again?"

"Oh. Er… Yes!" Bella beams at finding the right answer. "The cute one made the ducks leave me alone and the hot one helped me after that awful canoe knocked me down."

"I think you neglected to mention that small detail, my beloved," Edward says through clenched teeth.

"Did I? Well, a canoe fell on me. I forgot."

"Was there anything else about them you've forgotten?"

Bella thinks hard, she really does. But the misty raindrops sprinkling Edward's angelic face are almost as shiny as sunlight hitting his skin, and the image of a sparkly Edward consumes most of the wattage in her brain. "Er… No?" she guesses.

Edward nods. "There's something quite troubling about them. Alice sees them showing up at home; we must be ready. Go home where you'll be safe, precious one." He pecks a kiss onto her forehead and strides off to join the others.

* * *

Edward leads the way up the long driveway, tires spinning on the wet gravel. He can hear the thoughts of only one intruder-- at the moment they're predominantly of wet leaves, muddy ground, and staying upright, but every so often Edward catches something that unnerves him.

The Cullens are being watched. He's on their trail because of those stupid animals, the wolf packs they tore through and the mountain lion fiercely protecting her cubs that Rosalie had such fun with. Even that bear, the one Emmett and Jasper laughed would confound the rangers if they even found the scraps.

The intruder's disgusted, and concerned for Bella's welfare, and he's hunting them.

Edward brakes sharply by the porch and leaps from the Volvo. The others pull in beside him, Rosalie in her BMW with Alice, Emmett and Jasper in the Jeep.

"Alice, Jasper-- go inside and guard Esme. Emmett, around the back. Rosalie, you watch the door."

Rosalie drifts up onto the wide porch to block the front entrance, a bored expression on her lovely face. Edward bounds around the house. He meets up with Emmett on the east side. "See anything?"

Emmett shakes his head. "But I hear something rustling, there, off in the back."

Edward focuses on the deep shadows beneath the trees, and frowns. "I sense no one. Probably a deer. The one we're after is moving up past the lawn. Come." He stalks back to the front of the house.

Edward stops on the walkway at the foot of the porch steps. Feet apart, he sticks out his chest heroically and gazes down the cedar-shaded lawn. He directs his voice toward the treeline. "You may as well come out. I know you're there," he says, injecting a menacing growl into his melodious voice.

The hunter knows some inventive language. Edward's gentlemanly sensibilities are quite offended, and he frowns in disapproval. Branches sway, and the hunter clomps through the thick ferns and onto the grass.

"Guess I wasn't as stealthy as I thought, huh?" he says.

"I am gifted with the ability to read thoughts," Edward informs him loftily.

"Oh, yeah?" It doesn't seem to bother him particularly. He keeps walking up the lawn, a machete of all things swinging from one hip, and as he gets closer he looks Edward straight in the eye.

Edward twists his perfectly carved lips. "That's foul. And not anatomically possible."

"That's what you get for invading people's minds." The hunter shrugs and then motions at the house. "This the whole gang?"

"Carlisle's still at work," Emmett says helpfully.

Edward glares. "Don't tell him anything!"

"Sorry, Edward." Emmett hunches his shoulders.

When Edward turns back, the hunter has nearly reached him. The machete's drawn, held easily in one hand. Edward looks him up and down and then takes a step back, and up, so he's standing on the first stair. _Much better_.

It's hard to follow his thoughts-- they're skimming so quickly Edward can't quite catch them. He hears enough, though, that he knows the hunter's gotten a look at the situation and is weighing options for a strategic retreat.

Edward doesn't want him to retreat. Edward wants him taken care of right now, before he becomes more of a threat. He's killed for less, in the past.

He strikes a pose reminiscent of a martial artist's, one leg advanced, arm reared up to strike, his fingers clawed and aimed at the hunter's not-at-all-handsome-no-matter-what-Bella-says face. He has to angle his stance so he doesn't fall off the step, but it's still imposing. He bares his teeth and hisses loudly.

Edward expects the intruder to jump, or cringe in terror, or at least tremble, and then he'll pounce. He is fearsome, after all. Instead, Edward hears a wave of amusement come rolling through his mind.

"Dude-- seriously?" The hunter doesn't bother to hide his smirk.

Edward abandons the dashing stance-- Bella's not here to admire it anyway-- and simply leaps. The machete flashes up, but he doesn't fear a puny blade and he grabs for the hunter's throat. Something burns past his shoulder, throwing him off balance.

Edward stumbles to a halt. He missed! He actually _missed!_ He glances down and a flap is hanging from his jacket and shirt and there's a thin slice shaved off the top of his shoulder.

The hunter's looking at his machete. "You wrecked my edge, you jackass."

Edward's simply furious. His luminous topaz eyes nearly cross. The hunter's backing up and Edward gathers himself for another leap. He briefly wishes for a break in the clouds-- how magnificent he would look, striking like lightning, ablaze in sun-dazzle! He files away that idea for later and flexes his knees.

A rush of movement at the side of the house catches Edward's eye. He whips around and is stunned to see the second hunter rounding the corner. He can't hear him-- he can't read his thoughts at all!

Jasper crashes out onto the porch, smacking Rosalie aside with the door. "Edward!" he screeches. "Someone's circling around from… Oh."

"Dean, _go_," the second one says, and raises something toward Edward.

It's a… a crossbow. An actual crossbow. _How medieval_, Edward sneers. He stretches lightly up onto his toes-- he learned that move from Alice-- and poises to bowl over the tall hunter with a superhuman burst of speed. Amusing-- feeble arrows are no match for his amazing strength and mighty granite physique!

Before he can spring, the second hunter fires. Edward still has a condescending smile on his faultless stony lips when something slams into his chest with a dull 'thunk'.

Into… and it burns. There's a thick steel shaft _piercing_ him, and where the point has chipped his skin, it _burns_.

Edward snaps his head up in astonishment. The tall hunter is reaching down and fitting another bolt in place. He fires again and Emmett makes a surprised sound and sits heavily on the wet lawn.

The first hunter is disappearing down the sloped lane. Edward thinks he should give chase and so he tries to launch into super-speed. He's shocked to find he can only manage a leisurely lope. His shriveled veins sting unpleasantly with the motion.

Rosalie throws herself down beside Emmett, howling with rage and clawing at the thick bolt sticking out of him. _That's a good idea_, Edward thinks, and he places one exquisite hand on the bolt protruding from his splendid broad chest and pulls.

It comes away with a sickening slurp. Edward drops the bolt and tears open his shirt. The hole in his chest oozes slowly closed, but the flesh around it is strangely spongy. _If this mars my manly sparkle, I'll flay him alive_, Edward promises darkly, prodding at the blemish. There's a rotten-looking discoloration right where Bella likes to lay her head. At least it missed his perfectly symmetrical nipple.

"They're getting away," Jasper observes. He's clutching the porch railing and blinking furiously, and his own pale golden eyes are dilated.

"After them," Edward orders. He nudges Emmett with his foot as he passes, and the huge vampire rolls upright and lumbers after him and Jasper.

Edward still can't get above a regular run. He darts through the misty green forest, shirt flapping open over the pale gleam of his chiseled torso, but even as ethereally resplendent as he looks, he cannot find the swiftness needed to overtake the hunters. Emmett has more speed but seems to have lost all coordination-- he keeps veering off in random directions, and clipping tree trunks with his massive shoulders.

Jasper pulls ahead of them both, the edges of his nostrils fluttering. He leaps over a bank of ferns and is lost from sight.

Edward and Emmett burst out onto the road. The hunters are down past the end of the driveway with Jasper pacing in a circle, blocking their escape. The tall one's filthy-- he looks like he plowed through the mud and then went rolling in dead leaves. He didn't lose his crossbow, though, and has it trained steadily between Jasper's eerily glowing eyes.

Edward struts out to meet them. He thinks the effects of the profane weapon are starting to wear off-- he can barely feel the acid sting now. He'll goad them into running and then take down the one that keeps interfering with Bella; Jasper and Emmett can have the muddy one. Jasper in particular seems thirsty.

"You two didn't just walk all the way out here," Edward says. "So if you can make it to wherever you've hidden that piece-of-trash car of yours, we'll let you go." He tosses his head with a contemptuous smile.

The first hunter takes a step forward, not back. "What did you call her?"

"Who?" Edward's smile slips a fraction.

"You did _not_ just insult my baby."

"Your…?" Edward darts his eyes around. Emmett looks just as confused as he feels, and Jasper's so focused on the tall one he's not even projecting despair and surrender at them.

"You're pretty mouthy for a guy who drives a freakin' _soccer-mom_ mobile."

"Ah. You mean your garish, polluting heap of scrap." Edward sniffs. "The truth is not an insult."

"Dean, let it go!" the other one snaps.

He doesn't. He charges forward and Edward grins. But then his arm comes around and he's holding one of those crossbow bolts, the tip all black and sticky. The hunter stabs it right into the mottled stain on Edward's chest, framed by his picturesquely billowing shirt. It doesn't go in nearly as deep as the first one, but it burns just the same.

"Sam, go!"

The voice echoes weirdly, and the wet forest is sort of… tilty. Edward shakes his head. The hunters are gone. "Emmett, follow them!"

"No, me!" Jasper's in front of him, jiggling up and down on his toes, and if he breathed, he'd be panting. "Let me go, Edward!"

Edward nods. "Follow them, observe them. Then we'll make plans."


	5. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

"Sam, could you please stop shedding?"

Little showers of crackly brown leaves drift down onto the upholstery with every bump in the road. "I can't exactly help it."

Dean checks the rear view mirror and then cuts his eyes to his brother and moans. "Oh god, you're dripping mud on the seat!"

"So sorry my falling down while running for my life is bothering you." Sam pops the glove compartment and digs around until he comes up with a wad of paper napkins.

"Stop, you're just _smearing_ it!" One-handed, Dean wrestles the napkins away. "And you're not bothering _me_." He leans forward and pats the dashboard. "She's had a rough day. That dumbass was talking trash about her."

"She didn't hear him, Dean; she was too far back in the woods." Sam tries not to roll his eyes too hard, but the muck coating his face cracks anyway. Brown flakes sprinkle down and he concentrates on sitting very still.

"Machete alone isn't going to work on these things. I think my blade's shot to hell." Dean glances in the mirror again. "Dead man's blood did seem to slow 'em down some, but it sure didn't poison 'em like the ones in Colorado."

"We need something with a heavier blade." Sam watches Dean check the mirror yet again. "Someone back there?"

"Not that I can see, but probably." The sign for Cooper's Motel appears ahead and he slows. "We'll be okay for now, though."

"How do you figure?" A clump of mud slides out of Sam's hair to his neck and he squirms to scoop it out of his collar. Dean shoots a baleful glare at him and he freezes, quickly lowering his hand. The mud dribbles on down between his shoulder blades.

Dean nods at the sign as he pulls in. It's lit up to say 'No Vacancy'. "Place is filling up for that fishing tournament. Too many witnesses for the vampires to attack."

"I hope you're right." Sam scoots very gingerly out of the Impala, but Dean whimpers anyway. "Jeez, lemme grab a shower and then I'll wipe off the dirt!"

"No, I'll do it. You might miss some."

Half an hour later Sam steps out of the shower and discovers Dean's commandeered the towels. He dries off --mostly-- on a hand towel and wraps the sole remaining bath towel around his waist. The wind is blowing through the bathroom window with a strange hollow whistling sound, so he cranks the louvres shut and goes to get dressed.

There's a pile of damp, muddy towels by the door and the room reeks from the ashtray full of burnt saffron and weeds on the dresser, but Dean's missing. Sam flicks the curtains half open. The Impala's still parked outside their room, doors closed and windows rolled tight. He leans on the glass and peers around until he spots Dean, down the road past the motel office, swinging open the door to the diner flanking it.

Okay, good -- food, and maybe hot coffee. Sam peels away from the window and hitches up the towel. A shadow flickers past outside.

There's nothing there. He presses against the glass again and looks out. The only thing moving is the drizzle beading and rolling off the row of cars. After a long moment he turns and reaches over to test the doorknob. Locked. And the crossbow's right on the table where he can grab it in a hurry.

Sam lays out folded clothes in a neat line on his bed. A shadow slides past the window again, already gone by the time he raises startled eyes. It's probably just someone from another room passing by to get ice or a soda. Yeah. Probably. Sam tucks his towel tighter and crosses back to the window. He doesn't see anyone, but after another long look he pulls the curtains closed.

The wind is whistling again, which is odd because Sam doesn't remember seeing the trees moving. He picks up his shorts to give them a good shake and the door rattles in its frame and damn it, _no_ _way_ is the breeze blowing that hard!

He drops the shorts and is rounding the end of Dean's bed when the door bursts open and bounces off the wall. Sam yelps and stops in his tracks. The figure in the doorway sidles inside and gives the door a kick so it swings slowly shut.

"Oh, crap." Sam crowds back against the bed. It's the third vampire, the one he didn't shoot. Its nose is twitching like mad and it's making that hollow whistling he thought was the wind, and oh, hell, it's getting his scent is what it's doing. Sam measures the distance to the crossbow and inches sideways.

The vampire matches his motion and steps in front of the table. It reaches back to grab the crossbow in one hand and _squeezes_. The state-of-the-art weapon crumples like wet cardboard. The vampire's eyes are even darker now than on the road. Sam stops and counts in his head how many paces back to the closet and the canvas bags of weapons stowed inside. Too many. He flicks a glance at the door, and the vampire smiles, with just a glint of sharp teeth.

"You're Sam." It takes a deliberate step forward. Its chin is tucked to its chest and it's staring up at him through its eyelashes with a weird intensity. "I'm Jasper."

"Ohh-kay, then. What are you doing here?" Sam asks very soothingly. It doesn't look murderous; he could deal with murderous. It looks… hell. Sam's distinctly uncomfortable with how it looks. He shifts by slow degrees toward the end of the bed.

Jasper makes that hollow whistling sound again, its eyes rolling back in its head for a second. "Your scent is intoxicating."

"It… it's just motel soap," Sam stammers. He twists a really tight handful of too-thin terrycloth and edges sideways, the backs of his knees scuffing along the mattress. His phone's on the dresser; if he can just reach it…

"You ran out of the forest and I drank your scent. I cannot resist," Jasper says dreamily. It steps in tandem with Sam to cut off his retreat.

How the hell long does it take to pick up a couple of burgers, anyway? The thing's casting sultry orange eyes at him and Sam doesn't think snapping a damp towel is going to deter it for very long. He's pretty much out of options, but then Jasper's out of patience anyway. Next thing Sam knows, he's got a vampire springing right at his bare chest.

Sam yells and throws himself backwards. It's all dark eyes and sharp teeth and low buzzing growls and he hits the bed, one hand straining up and back beneath Dean's pillow but he comes up empty. His other hand's bracing Jasper's chin and it's babbling garbage about scents and destiny against Sam's palm and _dammit, this is bullshit!_ Sam knots his fist in the vampire's hair and jerks its head aside with enough force to crack its neck.

"_Dean! Damn it, Dean, get back here!_"

Somehow Sam gets one foot on Jasper's midsection and shoves hard enough to send it staggering and _where the hell is his towel?_ "_Dean!_"

Jasper's not breathing hard or showing any exertion at all. Back resting on the door, it peers through its eyelashes at Sam as it very carefully folds up the missing towel and tucks the square of fabric down its shirt. "You smell delicious."

"Look, no offense, dude, but not with a _dead_ guy." Sam scrabbles up toward the head of the bed. Without taking his eyes off Jasper, he twists his arm back, yanks open the nightstand drawer, and fumbles inside it. The only thing his fingers touch is a Bible, and neither that nor a cross will actually repel vampires. "Dean! I'm outta weapons! _Dean!_"

Jasper takes one step, then another, quicker, and then a third, its whole body tensing. Sam shouts, and rolls, just as the door smashes open, stopping Jasper cold.

Dean's silhouetted in the doorway, a paper bag printed with **Audrey's Place** in one hand and a cardboard tray of cups cradled in the other arm. He takes in the scene at a glance. "Holy…"

Dinner hits the floor. He shakes his arm, and a knife, the heavy serrated one, slides down his sleeve and into his palm. Jasper sends one last agonized glance at Sam and then jerks around, hissing, just as Dean punches upward with his knife.

It clanks on Jasper's solid flesh and the point sinks in, only a couple of inches, but it's enough. The vampire's hiss dies away. It stares hard at Dean, its deep orange eyes getting more and more desperate. For a split second Dean has an urge to withdraw the knife and sit on the floor. The feeling dies away almost instantly and he wraps both hands around the hilt and bears down.

Jasper gurgles and its knees buckle. It sinks down, slipping off the blade.

Dean rocks back and then lunges forward with a full-arm swing that shears past Jasper's neck. It doesn't come close to finishing the vampire, but the knife clips off a piece of stony tissue, sending it flying.

Jasper screeches and twists away. There's a dusky stain spreading out from the puncture wound and when Jasper claps its hand to it, its fingers make indentations in the softening flesh. It whips his head up, teeth bared.

"Dean! Watch out!" Sam's rolled clear off the bed and is scrambling to locate a weapon sturdier than a clock radio.

"Stay down!" Dean snatches up one of the scattered crossbow bolts and raises it like a dagger.

Jasper only needs one glance at the bolt homing in on its neck to decide it's time to retreat. It dives through the open door and takes off running. Dean charges after it.

Dean's half-a-dozen strides into the parking lot when he notices the curious guests leaning out their doors, gaping. He slams to a stop, looks from the fleeing Jasper to the long, sharp bolt in his hand. Realizes it really doesn't look good and sticks the bolt behind his back and tries to smile.

"Just a little… friendly disagreement," he calls.

Fortunately they aren't _that_ curious to get in the middle of… whatever it was. The doors close again, firmly. Jasper's vanished. Dean goes back inside and forces the door shut and puts the security chain on. "Sammy? You okay?"

Sam's on his back in the space between the two beds, still-damp hair standing on end, gulping for breath. He's dragged the coverlet half-off Dean's bed and bundled it over himself. Dean leans over the side with his eyebrows raised. "Y'know, you were right-- we _should_ call Dad."

"No!" Panic flashes across Sam's face as he struggles up, clutching his wrap. "No, no, it's under control! Don't, uh, don't get Dad involved in…" He gestures vaguely. "…this."

"Yeah, I'm not sure Dad could handle… this." Dean smirks. "Sammy! You made a new friend!"

"Shut up." He wraps the coverlet around and around his waist and shoves one hand through his ruffled hair. "Just… shut up, okay?" His eyes widen. "_What_ is _that?_" Sam points at a pale purplish lump lying against the far wall.

Dean crouches down beside it. "Huh." He prods it with the point of his knife. "Ear."

Trailing bedspread, Sam shuffles over. "Gross. But I guess the blood did something after all."

"Softened him up." Dean picks up the ear with the tips of his fingers and gives it an experimental jiggle. It feels too solid for a flap of skin and cartilage.

"Don't _fiddle_ with it." Sam grimaces.

Dean lets it fall and straightens up. "Just wanted to see if it bleeds glitter," he's saying when Sam snatches at his arm.

"Dean! Look!"

The ear's twitching. It's not shriveling up or crumbling into dust like a severed piece of vampire might be expected to do. It's lying on the thin carpet, quivering, the motion increasing as the seconds pass. As they watch, it manages to twitch itself a full inch in the direction of the door.

"Holy shit!" They both jump back. The ear shivers another inch across the floor.

"Damn. I thought either Bobby or the Mountie was joking about the parts twitching!" The ear's still heading toward the door and Dean grabs Sam's shoulder and steers him behind the bed. "Get some shoes on!"

"Dean, this is weird!"

"Tell me about it. There's a vampire ear hiking across the floor to rejoin its head." He watches it for another moment, and when it shows no sign of stopping, he grabs a wastecan and upends it over the ear. Dean points to the paper bag lying in the damp patch of coffee by the door. "Either that or it smells the food. Maybe it's hungry."

"If the things go all stony when they're turned, how can they smell anything?" Sam asks. "This one was sniffing after me, the one on the road said you smelled like Bella-- they shouldn't have any olfactory senses left!"

Dean's by the table picking mournfully through the shattered remains of the crossbow. "I dunno. They're solid rock, but they still have joints, and can run like hell. No fluids, but they can talk, and feel. Nothing about these vampires makes sense." He throws down the broken trigger in disgust. From beneath the wastecan comes a faint tapping, and Dean goes over and frowns down at it. "Chopped-off parts _move_. And what's with the damned _sparkling?_"

"The Mountie said something about secretions-- could be a protective coating. Blocks the sunlight so they don't burn?" Sam's fully dressed again, but after a moment's consideration, he reaches for yet another shirt and layers it on.

"Could be." Dean tilts up one edge of the wastecan, sliding his knife in the gap and flicking the ear deeper inside while he flips the can upright. "Just be grateful it didn't have the saliva to drool on you. Sure looked like it wanted to."

"Shut up."

Dean grins and swirls the ear in the can. "We better burn this." He sighs. "And find a new crossbow."

Sam nods. "And let's go buy some axes."

* * *

Alice is having either a vision or a full-blown panic attack.

"Jasper! Danger! Danger! Beware!" She clutches her head with both hands and rocks back and forth.

"What is it? What are you seeing?" Edward strides across the spacious living room and seizes her black-clad shoulders in his elegant marble hands, marveling at the fascinating contrast between skin and cloth.

Alice's hair is bunched tightly in her fingers; she tugs at her head, jibbering with alarm. "Jasper! Knife! Danger!"

"A knife cannot hurt us," Edward scoffs. Alice shrieks, wild-eyed, and he gives her a little shake. "Tell me what you see!"

"Edward! Don't pummel your sister!" Esme is seated on one of the huge couches with her arm around a bewildered-looking Emmett. She pats his massive shoulder and rises, gliding across the room to embrace Alice. "Alice, dear…"

"_Knife_!" Alice screeches straight in her face. "Blood! Jasper! Ear! Oh, his ear!"

Esme stumbles back, stunned, and Edward slides in to take her place. "Mary Alice Brandon Cullen Hale! You are being less than helpful!"

Alice's bobbling head slows and she gulps. "Jasper is in danger. The hunters… their weapons… they're poisoned, Edward, they're poisoned!"

"Yes, we've established that." He rubs his chest. "But it wears off."

"No!" Alice whips her head back and forth. "No, no, no, no, no! I see Jasper's ear flying. Off. His. Head!"

The Cullens gasp in unison and Edward scowls. "Nonsense. He's only watching them; he's in no danger."

"_Then what about that naked man_?" Alice howls, ripping free of Edward's grasp. She jetѐs through the downstairs rooms, shrieking in an unhinged manner while the others stare open-mouthed after her. 'What naked man?' Carlisle mouths, and Edward shrugs.

"Alice. Alice. Calm down." On her next circuit, Edward intercepts her with a steely arm. The tiny vampire slowly stills, as if her music-box mechanism is winding down. "You are seeing only one possible future, most likely the worst-case scenario. Jasper was a major in the Confederate army-- he's perfectly capable of spying undetected."

"Edward is right as usual, dear," Esme says. "Come sit down."

Alice makes a little gulping sob and lets herself be drawn to the couch. Emmett clumsily pats her knee and Esme perches at her side, making cooing noises. Rosalie, disgruntled that her family's attention is focused elsewhere, drifts over to the broad window and pouts into the darkening glass.

Edward paces restlessly, growling every few moments to heighten the impression of a dangerous creature on edge. Something deadly, and sleek-- a panther, perhaps, or a cobra. He tries out a hiss, remembers that the hunter laughed at him last time he did that, and goes back to rumbling growls. Hmm, yes, better. Definitely menacing.

From behind the couch, Carlisle is watching him with a quizzical lift of one eyebrow. "Have you a plan, Edward?"

"To kill them," he shrugs. "When Jasper gets back, we'll know if the hunters plan to run or if we need to draw them out. Either way, we shall destroy them." One hand propped on his hip, he raises his chin and gazes into the distance.

Rosalie stirs and points languidly. "Someone's coming up the lane."

En masse, the Cullens rush the door. Alice pops free first. "Jasper! Jasper, darling!"

He trots out of the deepening twilight, disheveled, with great bruised-looking circles beneath his eyes. His left hand is pressed to the side of his head. One-armed, he catches Alice's hurtling form and hugs her while his eyes meet Edward's over her head.

"What happened?"

"I'm… I'm all right."

"I didn't ask that. _What happened?"_

"Oh, Edward, really!" Esme pushes him aside and guides Jasper and the sniveling Alice up the porch steps. "At least let your dear brother get in the house."

Carlisle flicks the master switches, and light blazes through the house. Esme's hand flies up to cover her mouth. "Gracious! Jasper, your head!"

Sheepishly, he lowers his hand. Alice screams, a long, loud, warbling sound that rattles every windowpane in the house. Rosalie flinches and even Emmett manages to look impressed with the dark hole incised in Jasper's skull.

"He stabbed me," Jasper says over Alice's piercing shrieks. He turns his head so the others can see the fading stain down his neck. "With a tainted blade, and…" He pauses while Edward, glowering, gives Alice a sharp shake. Sometimes not having to take a breath is irksome. The noise dies to uneven sobs. "…and it made me vulnerable. He cut my ear right off," Jasper finishes.

There's a beat of silence. "How did he get close…" Edward bellows as the others shout questions and pull at Jasper. Carlisle is trying eagerly to see into the hole where the ear used to be and Rosalie is demanding someone, _anyone_, acknowledge the trauma done to _her_, and Emmett's roaring wordlessly just to contribute to it all.

Edward pinches Jasper's remaining ear and drags him aside. "How did they catch you?" he demands.

Jasper starts to answer, but Alice tugs him the other direction and rifles through his clothing with frantic pats of her little hands, searching for other injuries. "My cherished husband, what else have they done to you?" she moans.

"Not now, Alice." Edward swings Jasper out of her reach. "You were only supposed to observe…"

"Can I see the…"

"Jasper, dear, do you feel lightheaded…"

"Let's go stomp some…"

"What about _me_…"

A wounded little yip cuts across the hue and cry. The Cullens fall silent and turn as one.

"Jasper?" Alice has one arm upraised. From her hand trails a length of threadbare toweling. "What is this?"

Jasper slaps his palms to his half-unbuttoned shirt. A look of horror crosses his face, and if it could go any paler, it would. "I…I can explain…"

"_Explain?"_

He winces. "I was hungry. He smelled so…"

"_He?" _Alice's voice is rising to a shriek. _"He? He, Jasper? __**He**__?"_

Commotion explodes in the Cullen household. Edward twists away from his shouting, shoving family and rests his impeccable granite brow on the doorframe. "Would everyone _please_…"

He breaks off. Out in the dim green forest, a familiar, elusive mind is drawing close. Edward inhales scents, and one of them is echoed in the towel Alice is waving like a war pennant behind him.

At the same moment, Jasper breaks away from the fray. He pushes into the doorway beside Edward, his eyes searching the yard. A tall shadow slips between two cedars, and Jasper sighs.

* * *

_With apologies to: David Lynch and Joss Whedon._


	6. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

"Edward, Edward, wherever could you be, my Edward?"

Bella kneels at her bedroom window, arms outstretched in supplication. Her knuckles hurt from nearly punching through the glass, but now that she's raised the bottom half of the window, the cool evening air soothes them.

"Edward? Edward!"

She doesn't dare raise her voice, or Charlie might hear her. He still has no idea that every evening Edward climbs through her bedroom window so that she can bask in his beauty while he absorbs her scent. Charlie has some old-fashioned ideas about boys spending the night under his roof.

What he doesn't know won't hurt him. Anyway, a girl needs her sleep, and Bella won't get any unless Edward serenades her with lullabies crooned in the voice of angels. Falling asleep to _You Are My Sunshine _sung by a marble-chested vampire is more heavenly than hearing hymns performed in Westminster Cathedral.

Bella shifts uncomfortably. The floor's hard beneath her knees. Where _is _Edward,anyway? She's got the bedside lamp lit, the shade angled so he can do the whole 'What light breaks, it is the dawn' dealie the moment he steps out of the dripping trees. He's _late. _Yearning for an absent lover is romantic in books, but when your knees are numb and there's cold water dripping down the undersides of your arms into your armpits from the rain-soaked windowsill, it's kind of tedious. Bella checks the clock, tips over onto her seat for a minute to rub her knees, and then repositions herself at the window.

"Edward? Are you there?"

It would be nice if there was a full moon. Moonlight washing across the pale, crystalline face of her beloved would be… _breathtaking. _Bella does forget to inhale while she contemplates the monumental splendour of such a vision.

When she's done clutching her throat and wheezing, she wishes again that her hopes for a rose garden hadn't been dashed. Climbing roses, specifically, on a nice Italianate trellis. Not that Edward needs a trellis to climb her walls, but it would add to the ambiance. Roses are kind of essential to romantic ambiance, thorns be darned.

Darn Charlie and his dire warnings about powdery mildew and black spot fungus, anyway. Well, there are always plastic ones. They'd stay pretty in all the rain, too.

After another lengthy vigil the floorboards have pressed deep creases into her kneecaps, so Bella rises and gets her desk chair and drags it to the window. She sits and arranges herself, head tilted, hands clasped beneath her chin. She gazes wistfully out into the gathering dusk for her errant prince.

'Wistful' is very drying to the eyeballs. Bella sits back with a petulant flounce and rubs her eyes. Where. Is. Edward? He used to _like _to hover over her in the dark and watch her sleep. It's not like a couple of Wildlife Service officers are worth getting all worked up over, although they _were _very fine…though not as fine as Edward, of course, and also not sparkly.

Bella leaps up and paces in a circle. Faint glimmerings of an idea are coming to her. She bites her lip and squints. Yes. She could _go find him. _She could go to Edward and see why on earth he has forsaken her, left her alone in this tomb of her bedroom.

She nods firmly, decision reached. Charlie's snoring on the couch now, loudly enough to be heard in Puyallup-- he'll never notice if she takes the truck to the Cullens'!

Feeling inordinately proud of her bravery, Bella hurries to change back into her clothes.

* * *

"Remember," Dean says from behind the Impala's trunk, "you hang back in the trees and just shoot. I'll do the up-close work."

"Right, Dean. You'll lop off the heads of seven vampires by yourself." Sam carefully presses down the last strip of duct tape on his jacket. His arms are really heavy, but nearly every spare crossbow bolt they have is now taped within easy reach to his sleeves. He won't have to go digging through pockets when he needs to reload in a hurry.

"You bet. Unless you want to be out in the open where your buddy Jasper can waltz up and nibble on your neck. Stay _back_ in the trees and shoot from under cover so I don't have to explain weird shit to Dad." Dean gives the extra axe on his back a last adjustment and slams the trunk. "Let's go.

They walk right up the lane. Night's falling fast and Dean doesn't see any reason to flail around in the wet dark woods when the Amazing Mind-Reading Edward can hear them coming anyway.

At the top of the driveway, the Cullens' house is lit up like a chandelier. It doesn't fit with anything John said about vampires' habits-- huge uncovered windows that let sunlight in and lamplight out. The Cullens are strange, even for vampires, but at least they'll be visible.

They reach the lawn, and Dean motions Sam off to the left. His brother slips into the fringes of the woods, circling around to approach the house from the far side.

There are a lot of shrill voices coming from inside and Dean can see figures scuffling in the entryway. Hell of a weird time to have a family squabble, but hey-- it'll make his job easier if they aren't working together. He hefts the axe and steps out onto the lawn, taking position just below the porch steps. Unless they decide to smash through the windows, the Cullens will have to funnel out the front door, where Sam can pick them off one-by-one and then he can chop them apart. _Jump out the windows, jump out the windows, jump out the windows_, Dean thinks hard, in case Edward's poking around in his mind and tries to be clever by doing the opposite.

Dean's just wondering if he should shout hello or something when the front door crashes open. A dark figure swoops out and vaults the porch railing, trailing a low hooting sound as if it's blowing over the mouth of a bottle. Dean brings the axe up and back, but the vampire never even glances his way.

In the deep shadows past the far end of the porch, a bowstring resonates. A heavy bolt thunks into the vampire, right in the hollow of its throat. The shot doesn't slow it in the slightest. Dean knows the bow doesn't have the pull of the ones John had acquired, but it should at least have _some_ effect. A second bolt whirrs out of the dusk and buries itself just shy of the first.

There's enough light pouring from the house for Dean to recognize the back view of the speeding vampire, and he knows why it's too single-minded to be deterred. The door crashes open again but Dean's already abandoned his position to scramble after the first vampire. "Sammy! _Shit._ Watch yourself!"

A bolt streaks past his shoulder. Something solid and heavy makes a thunderous racket tumbling down the stairs, but Dean can't take the time to look.

Jasper skids to a stop in the wet grass beneath the cedars. The hooting has intensified to a constant, low-pitched whistle. It prowls in a semi-circle with its glittering eyes fixed on its target. "_Sam_."

Sam flattens himself against the nearest tree trunk. He's got no room to reload, so he jerks a knife free of his belt. Jasper closes one hand around the protruding bolts, rips them free, and flings them aside. Sam swallows and raises the knife as Jasper's lips peel back. "You still smell delicious."

Dean covers the remaining distance at a dead run, winding up as he goes. "Sam, duck," he spits out.

Sam slides down the trunk just as Dean swings. The axe head bites into vampire neck with an impact that shivers all the way up his arms. He rocks the handle and the blade scrapes free of the semi-solid flesh. Dean whirls, sweeping the axe around from the opposite side.

The blow slams Jasper hard against the tree trunk. Sam yelps and rolls as the body topples, practically into his lap. He shoves at it frantically, and a wild giggle escapes. "Is it bleeding glitter on me?"

Dean kicks the head behind the cedar's roots. "Reload now. Freak out later."

Sam slaps a bolt in place and hauls back to set the string. "Move."

Dean spins aside and Sam fires from his seat on the ground. The big vampire's rushing them; Dean crouches, snatches up Sam's knife and raises it, two-handed, so the thing'll run itself onto the blade when it leaps on them. He drops to one knee and braces for impact.

A rapid clank-creak-twang signals Sam's reloading and firing a second time. The big vampire staggers. "Hey." It paws at its chest. "_Hey_."

"I'll finish this one-- see if you can pick off the others." Dean hauls Sam up by one arm and gives him a push toward the trees.

The big vampire's still trying to reach Dean but it has three bolts' worth of dead man's blood spreading through its body; it stumbles to the left every time it tries to take a step. Dean lets it circle aimlessly to give the poison time to soften the stony flesh and throws a glance at Jasper's body. It's starting to twitch, and he really doesn't want to look but he thinks he hears a dull thumping starting up from behind the tree.

The crossbow sings out two more closely-spaced shots and something screeches. Dean has no idea how long they've got before the vampire pieces twitch themselves back together, so he brings the axe down on Jasper and kicks aside the severed piece. He checks to make sure the big vampire's still disoriented, that nothing else is bearing down on him, and moves to Jasper's nearer leg. It takes three blows and his wrists are throbbing before it breaks away. He steps over the body and raises the axe once more.

An unearthly shriek splits apart the dusky sky. Dean snaps his head up just something small and dark arabesques across the yard in fast, graceful swoops. Pitch-black eyes gleam with reflected light, and there's a grotesquely stretched mouth on a beeline for his throat.

A tall shadow detaches from a clump of mountain laurels. "Dean!" Sam shouts, and he drops in his tracks. Alice hurtles past, still screeching. As it whooshes over him, Dean hears the thump of a bolt driving home and the shriek rises even higher in pitch. Alice's dive breaks down into a messy tumble of arms and legs and somersaulting body.

Dean's up and moving while it's still rolling. One of its arms shoots out to stab sharp-nailed fingers into the ground; shredding wet grass, it jerks to a stop and whips its head up. "What have you done to my Jasper?" it screams.

Dean winces-- its voice is making his head ring. "Stopped it from tearing into Sam." He plants his boot on its shoulder before it can spring up and windmills the axe around. The piercing noise switches off.

It's damned substantial for something so tiny-- the one tainted bolt hasn't softened it much. Instead of cutting cleanly, the axe makes a dull clonking sound each time it lands. Dean's swiveling between Alice and Jasper, alternating blows and thinking it might be time to switch to his backup axe already when a freight train blindsides him.

What feels like five hundred pounds of cargo flattens him into the Cullens' lush front lawn. He can't breathe. The pinning weight shifts, and the spare axe strapped to his back nearly squeezes his lungs up his windpipe. A deep, pleased voice says, "Heh!"

Crap. The big vampire. Dean tries to lift his head and a freezing block of stone jams his neck back down until he tastes wet grass. He scrabbles his one free hand through the grass, trying to find where his axe landed. The vampire chuckles again and Dean's ribs creak.

The vampire's got one fist ground down on the back of his neck and the other crushing the center of his back-- it's even money which is going to kill him first, asphyxiation or a shattered spine. He tries yelling for Sam but produces only a thin wheeze.

Something _scrunches_. The weight on his back slides away, and when Dean rears up, whooping for breath, there's a big, dark sphere bouncing across the lawn along with all the colored spots dancing in front of his eyes.

"I told you you couldn't handle seven by yourself!" Sam snips. He's got his own axe in one hand, and he bends and grabs the collar of Dean's jacket with the other. He drags his brother half-upright and flips him to his back.

Dean lands right on a narrow rock hidden by the darkness, either that or it's his missing axe. What little breath he managed to catch leaves him in a hoarse cough.

"Where… th'others?"

Sam's shoving the big vampire with his foot so it's splayed out flat. He shakes his head. "Hit the skinny blonde one twice and the one I think is the father once. They ran behind the house. I can't find Edward."

Dean coughs again; it's definitely a rock, and it's gouging his back. He starts to roll over, but before he can push to his feet, the damn thing _twitches_.

At the end of the cold, hard arm, Alice's hand clenches convulsively. Spiky fingers dig into Dean's lower ribs.

No, Dean Winchester does not scream like a girl. He's just startled-- _anyone would be, okay? _He rolls around, swatting at his jacket until he breaks the fingers' grip. He jumps up and yanks the axe right out of Sam's hands and brings it down. Sharp, frenzied chops separate the arm at elbow, wrist, and fingers.

Sam's mouth is contorting with the effort not to grin. "Smooth."

Breathing hard, Dean points at him. "Crossbow, Sam. Shoot me some sparkly vampires." He motions with the axe at the big vampire Sam dispatched. "Get outta my way."

"Hold on." Sam plucks his knife back out of Dean's belt. He digs the treated point through the vampire's shirt and scores a line around its shoulder joint. He does the same to the other shoulder and scoots down to its hip.

"Jeez, Sam, hurry up." Dean turns in a slow circle, squinting into the dark trees; every rustle and drip has his nerves jumping. "Four of 'em still out there."

"Give these a minute to soak in," Sam says. He rises, sheathing his knife and swinging the crossbow around from his back. "Then take it apart. I'll be…" He jerks his head at a pair of closely-spaced pines and grins. "… watching your back for more wandering hands."

Two of the remaining vampires slip out of the blackness while Dean's hacking away, one rounding the corner of the house in a silent rush, the other darting out of the huge old cedars that dot the lawn. The one coming from the backyard still has a lot of its speed, but Sam's able to put a bolt in its neck anyway. Duct tape rips, another bolt clanks into place, and Sam spins to get the second one in his sights.

The fast one's almost on Dean. He crouched down when Sam fired, and now he lets Sam's nearly-dulled axe slip from his hand, reaches over his shoulder, and slides free his backup. He stands and whips it back in one motion.

The vampire freezes and cocks its head. Male, blond, looks older than the rest… "Carlisle, right?" Dean asks.

It's looking at the ground by Dean's feet, its eyes a matte black as it picks out the torn cloth and pale greyish lumps scattered about. Its lips flatten, showing a hint of teeth. "This is going to take a while to fix."

"Nooo!" a female voice howls. Carlisle's attention is jerked to something behind Dean. "Nooo, don't damage meee!"

Dean turns, just enough that he doesn't let Carlisle out of his sight. Sam's got the crossbow trained on the blonde female, and it's backing slowly away, its hands spread in appeal.

"Leave her alone," Carlisle snarls, tensing into a half-crouch. "Rosalie…"

Rosalie spins, long hair swirling in a pale cloud around her head. Sam levels the crossbow and Carlisle leaps at him, growling, one arm extended. "Back, fiend!"

Sam snaps the bow around and fires, hitting Carlisle just above the breastbone. The vampire looks down. "You are not following proper rules of engagement," it says in an outraged tone.

"Sorry-- I'm rusty." Sam meets Dean's gaze and nods. Dean steps toward Carlisle and Sam sprints after Rosalie.

The blonde hasn't gotten far, only to the porch, where it puts one slender hand on the railing and vaults over. It collapses onto the floorboards and scuttles back against the siding, still moaning, "Nooo, leave me alooone, you made my skin all mucky!" Sam swings the crossbow to his back, grabs the railing, and swings one long leg over.

The dead man's blood seems to have invaded whatever passes for a brain in stone vampires for Carlisle. It's stumbling in a tight circle, shaking its head and slurring Shakespearean-sounding threats. Dean circles with it, tapping the axe up and down in his hand and waiting for an opening. It's proclaiming its intent to duel Dean, with or without a rapier, and he's pretty sure it just called him a varlet.

Carlisle's slowing down, starting to have trouble keeping its eyes on Dean. "Why us?" it asks in a blurry voice. "W-we harm no wh-one."

"I wouldn't say that. And you keep expanding your family. Now you've got your kids turning people."

Carlisle tries to cock his head again, but it flops limply to his shoulder. "Bella? Sh-she fancies joining us forever."

"Bella doesn't come across as capable of making intelligent choices," Dean says flatly. "Edward shouldn't be taking advantage of the witless."

"Edward knows best for her!" Carlisle insists.

Dean sighs and swings. Carlisle's the easiest so far; the axe slices easily, with force to spare. Maybe because it had been a vampire the longest. He lets the body crumple and wheels the axe up and around to start breaking it apart.

A heavy, rafter-shaking thud resounds from the direction of the porch. Dean glances up, expecting to see Sam finishing the skinny blonde.

He's not. He's being pinned to the porch pillar, and from the too-familiar gurgling noises he's making, Rosalie's doing the pinning with stone-hard hands wrapped tight around Sam's throat.

There's no time to run over and pull the thing off him. Dean shakes a pair of slender knives out of his sleeves and whips one with desperate strength at Rosalie. It punches in, sinking between its straining shoulder blades. The vampire merely shudders its back; the blade slips out and clatters to the porch and Rosalie's hands clench even tighter.

Dean hurls the second blade, sidearm. He doesn't wait for it to strike, just snatches up the axe at a run. Releasing Sam to slide down the pillar, Rosalie rounds on him as he hits the porch running.

Its eyes widen at the sight of the axe, and for once an expression other than boredom crosses its face. "You can't kill me-- I'm too beautiful!" it says in disbelief.

Sam's sprawled on the porch floor, holding his throat and coughing. At Rosalie's words he rolls his eyes skyward and sweeps one leg into its ankles. The vampire goes over with a crash that rattles the gutters.

Sam's face is still too blue for Dean's liking. He brings the axe down so hard it bites clear through the neck to the floorboards. He bends and thumps Sam's back. "Up! Up, up, up! Keep moving!"

Sam rubs his throat. "Choking here."

"We'll ask the mom to get you a glass of water!" Dean hauls on Sam's arm. "Haven't seen the last two out here, might be in the house."

Sam peels a bolt free of his sleeve. "How 'bout we split up and I go in the back?"

"How 'bout you stick with me? C'mon, step it up."

They cross the porch, Dean ducking to peer in the windows, Sam scanning the yard. Patches of the ground are rustling ominously. Sam nudges his brother. "If they put themselves back together, do they remember who took them apart?" he whispers.

"How the hell should I know? Let's assume they reassemble pissed-off and finish the job before they can remember." Dean reaches for the doorknob.

The front door swings open silently. He pokes his head inside and takes a long, slow look around. The entry hall's empty, and with all the downstairs lights on, he can see into some of the other rooms as well. No one's visible and no one tackles him, so he edges through the door.

"Dean."

"_What?_"

"There's a truck coming up the lane."

"Oh, for… See if it's the cops." He drags the crossbow's strap up over Sam's head and takes the weapon. "If it's anyone else, make 'em go away. I'll be right inside."

"How am I supposed to…"

Dean shoves the axe at him. "Tell 'em it's a grizzly bear attack! Just get rid of them!"

He eases down the hall, pausing to jerk open a door that turns out to be a closet. Nothing's hiding inside, but some of the coats, especially a short, puffy parka with a wide fur collar, are pretty frightening. He closes the door and moves on.

A double-wide door leads to a huge living room-- there's a piano and a lot of enormous couches and not much else, which makes checking the room simple. Through an archway in the far wall, the end of a massive table is visible, the polished wood gleaming in the lamplight.

Dean passes through the arch and a pale, dark-eyed woman springs around the corner, practically in his face. "Get out of my house!"

When he jams the crossbow against her midsection, it clanks on rock-hard flesh. He releases the trigger and the woman's eyes darken to inky black as the bolt drills deep. "I won't let you destroy us!"

Dean steps back, patting at his belt, pockets, sleeves. "Oh, shit." The vampire snarls and he backpedals faster. "Sam? Hey, Sam! You've got all the bolts!"

The thing snatches at the crossbow's stock and rips the weapon from his grasp; he winces as it crashes against the wall. The vampire strides swiftly at him, forcing him back until he hits the table. "My family is healing right now. I can't let you hurt them further." Its hand twists into the front of Dean's shirt and it hauls him up bodily and flings him across the room.

The china cabinet breaks his flight. There's an almighty smashing of glass as he crashes through its doors, and then a secondary shattering cascade when he brings down the crowded shelves inside. The cabinet's legs creak under the assault, and then the whole thing collapses into a pile of splinters, with Dean on his back in the middle of it.

The vampire glides up, spitting him with dead black eyes. "Now look what you've done-- I spent a lot of time restoring that."

Dean scrambles backward, glass crunching. His cheek's stinging and so is his neck and when he swipes his hand down, his fingers come away red. He looks up to see the vampire tipping its head back, mouth half-open and pulling in the scent of blood. "Oh, shit."

He's twisting one leg back, fumbling for the hold-out knife in his boot, when Sam comes crashing through the doorway. Momentum carries him into the table, but he bounces off and barrels across the room, windmilling the axe around. The vampire doesn't even have time to turn on him.

Sam offers a hand to his brother and drags him to his feet. "If you're done being lunch, we have a problem."

"I had it completely under control."

"Uh-huh."

"I was luring it close enough to stab. What problem?"

Sam knocks pieces of sugar bowl off Dean's shoulders. "Bella's in the truck."

"Oh, crap."

"Yup." He retrieves the crossbow and turns it in his hands, looking worried. "She wouldn't leave without Edward."

"Sonuva…"

"Yup. And the parts are really starting to move around out there. We need to get a bonfire going."

"Gotta find the last one first."

Sam claps a bolt into position and cautiously cocks the string; the bow seems to be holding together, so he slings the strap back over his shoulder. "Got that taken care of for you. Edward's on the roof."

"Oh, god, he thinks he's a ninja." Dean's corralling the head behind tipped-over dining room chairs in an effort to keep it from reattaching. He sighs as he grabs the axe. "Let's go knock him down."

_With apologies to Wiliiam Shakespeare._


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The kitchen is silent and dark and smells a little musty from disuse. Dean pops the deadbolt on the back door. He's trying to distract Edward by thinking about food-- hot, greasy fries and bacon cheeseburgers smothered in onions and chocolate-glazed donuts and milkshakes and steak and mashed potatoes and the funnel cake they got at that country fair when they were kids once-- and only once-- because the powdered sugar in the backseat nearly gave Dad a stroke.

Like he and Sam were the ones who opened that car window at 50. Sure was good, though, and he hopes Edward's envious of what he's been missing out on all these years.

By this time he's easing down the back steps with Sam practically treading on his boot heels. "Can you see him?"

Sam twists to scan overhead. "Uh-uh. Must've gone over the roof ridge."

"Circle around front and keep your eyes…"

A rapid scuttling comes from overhead. Something plummets down out of the darkness. Edward lands directly behind Sam, feet sinking deep into the ground. It looks surprised to see Sam behind Dean, and its eyes flick between the two hunters for a second. Then, as Sam's whirling on it with the crossbow, Edward snaps one elbow up and clips him beneath the chin.

"Sam!"

He goes over backwards and hits the back stairs with a 'clonk' and then slithers down them, to sprawl half-propped against the riser. Edward gives him a dismissive glance and glides in front of him. It faces Dean, raises clawed hands, and hisses.

It still looks like an idiot, but Dean's too pissed to laugh. "Sam? Sammy!"

"Uh?" His brother lifts his head an inch or so, gaze wandering like he can't quite place the source of the voice.

Dean hefts the axe and bounces it against his palm. "Oh, I am so gonna smack the snot out of you."

Edward sniffs. "I do not, in fact, have any…"

"_It's a figure of speech!_"

He swings with all the force he can gather. Edward casually sticks out a hand as if someone's passing the salt and catches the handle just below the blade. Dean finds himself yanked to Edward with a bone-rattling crash. Somehow he manages to keep both hands on the axe. Edward gives it a hard shake, but no way is he letting this thing get his main weapon away from him. He hangs on and Edward tries to shake him off again and finally just flings it out and away.

Dean goes tumbling across the backyard with the axe still clenched in his hands, trying not to roll on the blade. He comes to a stop and flops onto his stomach. The Cullens haven't put nearly as much effort into their landscaping back here as in the front-- the lawn's thin and rocky and kinda unpleasant to land on.

He lifts his head. Edward's strutting toward him, hands on its hips. It bends, reaching for him, and Dean aims a blow at its wrist. He's at a bad angle and Edward just swats it aside and drags him up by the arm. It slings Dean around again, its hard hand nearly wrenching his elbow out of joint before letting him fly.

"Shit." This time it take him a second or two to catch his breath. Dean hangs on to the tree that brought him up short and tries not to think about that field report on the grizzly bear. He pushes off the trunk and wobbles out to meet Edward, who's smiling a smug little smile and still strutting like it's got swivels in its hips.

"You sadly overestimate your fighting skills," it tells him. "But you should provide some small entertainment before I finish tearing you into pieces."

"Oh, like we did with your family?"

The smile fades into a petulant little frown. "Temporarily, I assure you. You see, what you do not know about us is that we are indestructible. Your weapons and your poisons have but a momentary effect." Edward's fingers race down the front of his shirt, unbuttoning and spreading it wide. "You see? Or maybe you don't, it's dark. But my chest has completely healed from your assault, and I am none the weaker for it."

Dean grimaces. "Dude, put your shirt back on."

"My beauty confounds you, but it is a deadly beauty, and I will use it to full advantage to have my revenge on…"

"Edward? Oh, Edward, I've been so frightened!"

Bella gallops around the side of the house and heads for her beloved, arms outspread. Edward's face freezes in an expression of alarm, and Dean can't blame him, really.

"Bella, dearest, don't…"

She trips on the rough ground. Arms stretched before her, she executes a perfect jackknife dive and slides into Edward's ankles. She hits with enough force to toss its feet higher than its head. The vampire crashes down on its back, just barely missing its beloved.

Bella rolls over, and, seeing Edward so conveniently horizontal, throws herself onto its chest. "You didn't come to sing me to sleep! I waited and waited! Where were you? Don't you love me anymore? Oh, Edward!"

Dean rushes up, intending to drive his last treated knife into the vampire's neck, but Bella's got her arms clamped right where he needs to stab. He grabs the back of her jacket, but she's stuck fast. "Get outta my way, you airhead! Your boyfriend's a vampire!"

Bella turns to look up at him. "I know that."

Dean gapes at her. "You _know?_"

"Of course. Isn't he _beautiful?_ He sparkles in the sunlight, too!"

"Bella, let me up." Edward pulls and pushes, trying to dislodge her, but she holds on stubbornly.

"Not until you tell me why you didn't come see me." She gasps. "You _are_ breaking up with me, aren't you?"

"No! Bella, light of my universe, I'm a trifle busy at the moment!"

Dean makes another grab for her. "Sweetheart, I'm busy too, and you're in the way. Let go of the bloodsucker."

"Stop that! Edward, why won't you answer me? Why are you out here talking to the Wildlife Service instead of tucking me in at home?"

"They are not Wildlife Service," Edward says with gritted teeth, peeling at her fingers.

Bella twists sideways again to look up at Dean. "You aren't? Then why are you…?" Her eyes light on the big knife in his hand and then travel to the heavy-duty axe by his feet. Slowly, her mouth drops open.

Dean can _see_ the gears clicking laboriously in her brain, and damn, it's painful. He counts backwards from ten as her eyes get bigger and bigger and her chin drops lower and lower, and just as he's thinking he should have given her a longer countdown, she _gets_ it.

Bella screams. She doesn't have the reach or range of Alice, but she gives it her best. She also flails wildly at Edward, trying to wrap herself protectively around him but mostly just batting him in the face. Edward's trying to extract himself from under her and the more he tries to pull away, the harder she fights to stay attached. She shrieks and shrieks until her voice peters out and she suddenly slumps over.

Edward rolls her limp body unceremoniously off his and springs into a combat stance.

Dean raises his eyebrows. "Aren't you going to make sure she's okay?"

"She forgets to breathe sometimes," Edward says. "That will not be a problem once she is one of us." It bares its teeth in a silent snarl. "And now…"

"Yeah, _now!_" Dean spins aside.

There's a thud and Edward staggers. The vampire jerks around to see Sam stumbling back into the side of the house from the crossbow's kick. It looks back over its shoulder and there's a bolt sticking out the back of its leg.

"What the hell was that?" Dean bellows. "Aim for its _neck_!"

"I _was_ aiming for its neck!" The tape on Sam's sleeves hangs empty, and he's digging feverishly through his pockets for more bolts.

A deep, rumbling growl is building in Edward's throat. The vampire tenses, and Dean's moving to block it jumping on Sam when it whips around and lunges at him instead.

Dean ducks, one hand falling to the end of the axe handle. He heaves it up and around. The back of the blade cracks into Edward's knee, and the vampire's leg goes out from under it with a grinding crunch. It sprawls face down in the dirt.

Dean gives the axe a little upward spinning toss, catches it, and chops it down blade-first just above the bolt embedded in its leg. Edward yowls in shock, the sound echoing in the wet forest. It twists to stare at its severed limb and then back again to make a grab for Dean's legs. He steps out of reach of its grasping fingers, raises the axe high… and Bella hurls herself onto Edward, right in the path of the killing blow.

Dean checks his downward stroke so suddenly he stumbles sideways and knocks into Sam, who's just wobbling up dizzily with the crossbow finally reloaded.

Bella showers kisses onto Edward's head and throat while the hunters catch their balance. "How could you? Edward is beautiful and he loves me-ee-ee! Oh Edward! You're broken! I don't know what to do-oo-oo! You mean thing! Get away from my beautiful Edward!"

Sam circles the thrashing couple. He squeezes his eyes shut, then stretches them wide and blinks. He points the crossbow. "Want me to shoot it?"

Dean pushes the wavering bow to the side. "One sec while I shift the airhead." He grabs Bella under the arms. "C'mon, sweetheart, time to let go of the undead boyfriend."

"Noooo!" Bella plasters herself tighter to Edward. "We're meant to be together forever!"

"Just pull her off, Dean," Sam groans.

"She's… suctioned… or… something!" He yanks on Bella with each word but only manages to thump her and the vampire up and down a bit.

Edward rolls, cradling Bella protectively in stony arms and ignoring her muffled squawks. "Leave Bella alone!"

"Get her out of the way and we will." Dean paces, just out of reach of the glowering vampire. A sudden twitch catches his eye, and he snaps out, "Sam, kick that leg away. Now look, Eddie, it's pretty cowardly to use your girlfriend as a shield. Let go of her so she doesn't get hurt."

Edward lies in the dirt with his arms full of a snuffling Bella, seething. Its black eyes shift to Sam, weaving a little but still perfectly capable of landing a shot somewhere on Edward's body, and then to Dean, who has a really big knife and a really heavy axe and a decidedly dangerous expression. Edward's shoulders sag a fraction and it shifts Bella to one arm.

"I will if you will allow me one thing first. I must sample the sweet nectar of her blood before shuffling off this mundane plane of existence. Let me drink her fragrant lifeblood-- I have denied myself for too long."

"Edward!" Bella jerks her chin free of the hard, cold fingers that are stealthily pressing her head down and to the side, exposing her neck. "Are you…? You want to…"

"Bite you, yes." Its lip curls, and a sharp white tooth gleams.

Her chin begins to quiver. "But you're supposed to _turn_ me, not _kill_ me! Edward!"

"Let us die together, my Juliet, as I am forever your…"

Dean rolls his eyes. "You know what? Screw this." He grabs Bella's collar, tearing her away from the vampire and dumping her in the grass at Sam's feet.

Sam fires, Edward stiffens in mid-lunge, and Dean slams down the axe.

Bella seizes the ankles of the hunter pointing a scary arrow-gun thingy at her darling Edward and shakes him, screaming for all she's worth. She hears a strange loud splitting sound and freezes. Something _awful_ goes bouncing past her horrified eyes.

Bella's vision tunnels out into a corridor of twinkling sparkles that fade rapidly into a distant pinpoint. With one last scintillating starburst, everything goes black.

Sam nudges Bella's limp body with his boot and stutter-steps to the side before he trips on her. He looks at Dean, staring down at the vampire's body as if he can't quite believe it's done, and grins. "Got 'im!"

Dean sighs heavily. "Yup." He leans the axe against his leg and slides his hand into his pocket. "We need the gas in the trunk. You…" He stops and leans forward to peer at Sam's eyes. "Okay, never mind. I'll get the car. You-- over here." He steers Sam to the back steps and sits him down. He takes the crossbow away from him and props it on the stairs and replaces it with the axe. "Keep an eye on the parts and give 'em a whack if they move too much."

"Okay." Sam's hair is hanging in his eyes, and he blinks rapidly, without much effect. "What about Bella?"

"Leave her." Dean shrugs. "She looks comfy to me."

Bella stirs while Dean's gone. She whimpers and pushes up onto her elbows, looking dazedly around. She catches sight of the really tall guy sitting on the Cullens' back steps with an axe across his knees and she whimpers again and sags back into the grass.

Sam leans his aching head in his hand and waits for Dean.

* * *


	8. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

There are a lot of parts to gather up.

The hands and arms have made the most progress, and Dean has to break some of them apart again. Sam shuffles around the corner of the house, dragging a big metal trashcan he found by the garage.

Dean pauses and leans on the axe. "We light a fire on top of this hill, it'll be visible for miles, even with all the trees."

Sam points back the way he came. "The backyard slopes down into a kind of gully."

"That'll work."

The vampire pieces feel like chunks of smooth rock, heavy and dry, but they're making Dean's skin crawl. He goes to unearth a pair of gloves out of the trunk.

Sam gets distracted by one of the hands gluing itself back to a wrist or whatever the hell it's doing, and Dean ends up tossing parts into the trashcan all by himself. Sam sits in a pool of light with the arm twitching on the edge of the porch and his face two inches away from it.

"Watch that thing doesn't stick itself to your nose," Dean warns.

"It's not interested in me," Sam says absently.

"If it's one of Jasper's parts, it is. C'mon, Sam, toss that in the can and help me out here."

"But how do they do it?" Sam asks, rising with the arm's sleeve pinched in his fingers. "The edges aren't just sticking back together, they're knitting or absorbing into each other or something. And look, these parts are all mixed up, but that leg's going _around_ Alice to reattach to Jasper where it belongs. How does that work exactly?"

"Don't know and don't care. If you're not gonna help me with the pieces, start collecting weapons. I want my throwing knives back."

Sam crouches down and wrenches a bolt free. "Okay, but what I'm thinking is that we don't want the heads anywhere near the rest of the bodies. They get close to the right neck, I bet they'll reanimate."

"Yeah, we better light two separate fires."

It takes both of them to drag the filled can around back and to tip it out in the rocky depression at the foot of the slope. Dean leaves Sam with a flashlight, separating heads from the pile of quivering limbs, while he trudges back to the Impala for the gas cans.

Bella's huddled up whimpering to herself, but she's not getting in his way at the moment. Dean lets her be and hands off the gasoline. Sam's even made a pair of rough fire-rings with the wet rocks he's pulled out of the ditch.

He snatches the box of matches out of Dean's hand. "Hurry up! The heads are _rolling!_"

"Light 'em up, Sammy. I'll start dragging bodies down."

He's pretty tired by the fourth one. They're _heavy_. Deadweight-- literally-- and made of stone besides. So there's nothing wrong with rolling them down the slope to the bonfire.

And Sam does have a good couple of blazes going. Sure, they're gas-fueled, but who'd've thought chunks of rock would actually burn? They are, though, flaring up with weird bluish-orange flames and then burning down into coals lit from the center with purplish-black like an angry bruise.

The smoke's dense and billowing along the ground instead of rising to the sky. It reeks like a New Age incense shop and Sam's kind of obscured, but Dean can hear him sneezing steadily.

"Stand upwind, Sam!" he calls, and boots another torso down the hill.

"There is no upwind!" Sam bitches, and then he cusses because he didn't get out of the way of the log-rolling vampire fast enough. The flames leap skyward as he wrestles the body into the fire and Dean turns and smacks flat into Bella.

She swaying, but she's upright, and she's staring slack-jawed down at the fire. Some of the stony coals collapse into soft-looking ash, and a burst of sparks flies up against the black trees.

"What are you _doing?_" Bella gasps. "Is that…? That's _not _my Edward you're burning! No! It can't be!"

"Now look, Edward was a vampire, and he was planning on turning you into one, too. Do you have the slightest clue what that would be like? What about your family and friends, how would they..."

"_He's beautiful!" _Bella screams. She needs no more reason than that, and she takes off running down the yard. "I'm coming, my Edward! Soon I'll be with you for all eternity!"

"Oh, crap. Sam! Stop her!"

"You owe me for this one!" he yells back, and steps out of the heavy swirls of smoke.

The ground's rough and on an incline. Bella only gets halfway to her goal of flinging herself onto the pyre before she trips. The wind is knocked completely out of her. As she lifts her head, struggling to breathe, a very determined arm wiggles its way out of the fire.

She doesn't have the air to scream, so she does the next best thing-- she faints.

Sam and Dean stand over her, looking down at the girl sprawled at their feet. Dean absently kicks the arm back into the fire, sending up another puff of strongly scented smoke. "She's a lot of trouble," Dean says. "I say we lock her in her truck."

Sam nods. "Good idea. You do it-- I'm concussed."

"Oh, for… Okay, fine. But _you _owe _me, _big time."

The door's open and the keys are still in the ignition. Dean heaves Bella off his shoulder and onto the seat, shoves her over, and pockets the keys.

The Cullens' cars are still parked at the top of the driveway. There's just enough space for the truck between Edward's Volvo and an oversized red Jeep. Dean pushes the truck until it rolls slowly into the space. Now the truck doors won't open more than a few inches, too little clearance for Bella to escape if she wakes up, but enough to keep her occupied trying. Dean rotates his arm back and forth and rubs his shoulder and goes to drag another vampire to the backyard.

The last one finally thumps into the flames in a shower of sparks. Sam sneezes and wipes his eyes. "You know, Forks police aren't going to have much of a forensics lab, but they can probably manage to lift fingerprints."

"Dammit." Dean frowns at the rings full of weird smoldering ashes. "Okay. I'll go wipe down whatever we touched and see if I can find a shovel. When everything's burned down, scoop the ashes into the trashcan-- we'll dump 'em in the river on our way out of town."

He leaves Sam with a snow shovel from the garage and backtracks through the house, rubbing doorknobs and chair backs and railings with a clean rag. The smashed china cabinet is going to make them wonder, but Dean picks up any broken bits that look like they might have blood on them and stuffs them in a tote bag from the front closet. Finally he switches off half the lights, locks the doors, and heads out to collect Sam.

Sam's holding the trashcan at gunpoint.

Slowly, Dean lowers the bag full of broken glass and spreads his hands. "Sam. Hey. It's okay, Sam. How 'bout you put down the gun. I'll take out the trashcan and you sit down and rest."

"They're _moving, _Dean," Sam says flatly. He's got a two-handed grip on the gun and is sighting down his outstretched arms like he means business and it's too dark to see how out of it he is. When Dean doesn't answer, he makes an impatient noise. "Pick up the flashlight and look. The ashes are _moving_."

When he edges up and shines the beam down into the can, Dean jumps. "Holy crap. What. The. Hell."

"I have no idea." Sam inches up beside his brother, still aiming the gun at the slowly roiling mass in the trashcan. "It started up while I was chucking the rocks back down in the gully. I heard this whispering noise and…" He motions at the contents with the gun.

"Holy crap." Dean scrubs at the back of his neck, where his hair's standing on end. "It looks like a cement mixer. It's gonna start pouring out brand-new vampires any minute now! Okay, new plan: There are a bunch of buckets and cans in the garage. We divide up this stuff as much as we can and take it with us. Every hundred miles or so, we dump some out. We cross a river or pass a cliff, we pour out a bucket. Spread it wide enough across the country, maybe that'll keep 'em dead."

Sam lets the gun lower a notch. "You think?"

"Jeez, I hope so." He rubs his neck again. "These are the _weirdest _vampires in the history of…"

"Everything," Sam finishes. He tucks the gun in his waistband and reaches, a little squeamishly, for one of the handles. "Hey, we can see if even the ashes sparkle in the sun!"

Sam has kind of a broken head, which is the only reason Dean doesn't drop his side of the can and whack him one.

* * *

They leave Bella parked in front of the Forks Police Station, with her wrists tied to the steering wheel.

Sam slides out of the driver's seat and reaches back in, pulling Bella over far enough to loop the rope through the steering wheel and knot it tight. She tries to kick him but only manages to make the glove compartment flop open and crack her knees.

"It's, like, Murder One or something, what you did," Bella rasps. Her voice is hoarse from all the screaming and crying and from whining non-stop on the trip from the Cullens'. Sam owes Dean, all right-- he hasn't quite figured out what, but once his ears stop ringing, he'll think of something good.

"The victim has to be alive for it to be murder," Sam says gently. He cracks the window for fresh air and presses down the lock button with a sleeve-covered hand. Bella's trying to spit out so many things at once that her tongue gets a cramp, so Sam closes the door on her inarticulate sputterings and places the keys on the hood.

Dean pulls up in the Impala and leans out the window. "Get in. And watch your feet."

The back is filled with containers and there's a tin bucket and an old glazed flowerpot on the front passenger floor, each holding a couple of inches of shivering ash. "Aww, do I have to sit with this stuff?"

"Yes. Did you wipe your prints?"

"Yeah. Did you dump the trashcan?"

"Rolled it down the riverbank." Dean points a warning finger at Sam as he wedges his feet between the containers. "You spill one speck of sparkly ash in this car and I'm giving Bella your phone number. She will haunt your ass forever."

Sam leans back and closes his eyes. "Roll up the window before you pull out, Dean."

The sun is just peeking over the horizon as Dean makes a tight U-turn and roars down the road out of Forks, Washington.

* * *


	9. Epilogue

Epilogue

Edward is dead.

Well, technically he was dead all along; no heartbeat and cold hardened flesh tend to have that result.

But this time he is really, _really _dead, and it's really devastating and all the sparkle has gone from Isabella Swan's world. All she wants to do is lie in bed crying and hugging her copy of _Romeo and Juliet _to her chest, but there are all these really annoying things going on around her.

First Mike the deputy shows up for work, and instead of doing something useful like untying her and chasing after those two murderers, he calls Charlie. And of course Charlie comes skidding up in his cruiser yelling about her sneaking out all night and is she all right and why is she tied to her truck and why didn't she call-- well, because her purse is on the floor, DUH. And he wants to know who tied her up, and when she tells him it was the two Wildlife Service officers and that they killed Edward and chopped him up and burned all his pieces and also all his family, Charlie gets this really worried look and wants to know Were you at a party and Did someone give you something and Was it Edward.

And so Bella has to explain No, no, no, it wasn't a party, it was because Edward didn't come to her room last night and she had to go find him, and that makes Charlie get all red in the face and shouty. Because Charlie is really old-fashioned about boys spending the night in bed with her.

So then Bella has to explain that Edward is a total gentleman due to being over a hundred years old and a vampire as well so Charlie can _just relax. _

When the ambulance arrives, Charlie tells the EMT he wants a complete tox screen and Oh, keep Dr. Cullen away from Bella.

And that's how Bella finds herself in the hospital with a nurse checking on her every ten minutes instead of home in bed sobbing for her topaz-eyed Edward.

Nobody believes he was a vampire, and nobody believes he is dead.

"But then where are the Cullens?" Bella demands, and Charlie replies in a very sad voice that it looks like they skipped town after Edward's creepy behavior with Bella came to light. The house is closed up, the cupboards and refrigerator bare.

"Because they're _vampires _and they don't _eat_," Bella says. "Or they _were_, before those two guys killed them and burned them up!"

Charlie replies that it's impossible to burn seven bodies in one night without a crematorium, and when Bella insists that she saw it with her own eyes and that burning vampires smell like incense and gasoline and that their pieces try to crawl away from the fire, Charlie puts his head down and pats her shoulder for a very long time.

The result is that Bella has to talk to a tranquil woman who asks her lots of questions. Bella doesn't like it because she has to think about really complicated things the woman-- who is a doctor but not as gorgeous as Carlisle—wants to discuss, like self-esteem and inner strength. Even after she's done in the hospital and goes home and is back in school, Bella has to keep talking to the woman.

It's mostly really annoying stuff about finding self-reliance instead of being co-dependent and seeing inner beauty rather than getting preoccupied with surface glitz and broadening one's horizons with some hobbies.

"I _had _a hobby," Bella says. "At least until those two nutjobs with the weapons took him away from me."

That leads to a discussion about how a healthy hobby usually involves more than letting a boy be patronizing and a danger to you simply because he's attractive, which, like, is _so_ not how it was. Edward wasn't _patronizing, _he was _protective_, and maybe he was dangerous but that was only because he was a vampire, and he made up for it by sparkling so beautifully.

So then they have to talk about self-esteem some more and how tying yourself to a truck in the middle of the night when you've had a disagreement with your boyfriend is a cry for help and everyone really does want to help Bella get better and to find a goal for her life other than being dead-- or undead, as the case may be.

It's not really all that fun, but Bella doesn't have much else to do now that her beautiful and oh-so-sparkly Edward isn't around to gaze at anymore. She never does quite get the hang of having hobbies, though sometimes she and this girl Angela from school wander around together. She finishes high school and forgets to go to her prom and almost forgets her own graduation until Renée says I flew all the way up here to this cold wet podunk town so you're going out on that stage to pick up your diploma.

And the thing with the high heels and the balloon bouquet strings and the sound system control board hardly even spoils the ceremony that much.

Her grades turn out to be adequate for getting into college even without any extracurriculars or community service. Since she's finally given up insisting that her boyfriend was a vampire who was killed by a cute guy who once saved her from angry ducks and a hot guy who helped her after a canoe accident, Charlie gives his blessing for her to go out on her own.

She's accepted to a school in Wisconsin, where, before the first semester is over, Bella gets mixed up with an incubus that's been stalking the campus.

But that's a story for another day.

* * *

_**The End.**_

Thank you all for sticking with this to the end.


End file.
